Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

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

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

Young people are fed up with the often prudish, vague, and incomplete information about sex and relationships that they are getting from their teachers—and parents. So they are turning to often explicit TV series, and even online pornography, to get answers. Not a good move.

During my school talks on human rights, more than half the pupils describe their lessons about sex as ‘poor’, ‘inadequate’, and ‘out of touch’. 

Little wonder that millions of young people are entering adulthood emotionally and sexually ill-prepared. Too many subsequently endure disordered relationships, ranging from unfulfilling to outright abusive.

The result? Much unhappiness—and sometimes mental and physical ill-health. We need to change that.

One problem is that a lot of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) classes still concentrate on the biological facts of reproduction and on using a condom to prevent HIV. Relatively little teaching is actually about sex—or feelings and relationships.

Also, RSE frequently starts too late, after many young people have become sexually active and adopted bad habits such as unsafe sex. These are harder to reverse once established.

While RSE should not encourage early sex (it is best if young people wait), it should prepare them for a later satisfying, safe sexual and emotional life.

What, then, needs to change in order to make RSE more effective?

Young people’s health and welfare must take priority over squeamishness and embarrassment about sex. Political, religious, and cultural sensitivities cannot be allowed to thwart mandatory age-appropriate RSE in every school, from the first year of primary education onwards.

It is time that RSE is revised radically. Based on listening to young people’s own ideas during my talks in schools, here are some suggestions.

Mandatory High Quality Lessons in Every School

RSE is now mandatory but for some schools its provision smacks of a tick-box exercise, with the lessons offered being infrequent, inadequate, and not meeting pupils’ needs. This is not good enough. Sex and relationships are a very important part of most adults’ lives. That’s why high-standard education about them should happen in every school, with no opt-outs for religious schools and independent schools outside the state sector. The aim should be to prepare young people for adult life by ensuring they are sexually and emotionally literate.

RSE lessons should be at least monthly throughout a child’s school life—not once a term or once a year. And the lessons should be LGBT+ inclusive.

Education From the First Year of Primary School

RSE needs to be age-appropriate. It should start from the first year of primary school by talking about love and relationships, including non-traditional families (such as single-parent, extended, and same-sex families).

It should also discuss the correct names for body parts and the physical changes that occur at puberty. To tackle abuse, grooming, and inappropriate touching, children should be taught the difference between caring and exploitative behaviours.

One reason for starting young is that many children now begin puberty between the ages of eight and twelve. Long beforehand, they need to know about the physical and hormonal changes they will undergo, like body hair growth and erections in boys and menstruation in girls. Keeping them ignorant threatens their happiness and welfare.

Sex Is Good for You

RSE lessons should acknowledge the risks and dangers of sex, but from the age of 16 they should also recognise its pleasures—and that sex is good for us. It is natural, wholesome, fun, and (with safe sex) healthy. Quality sex can have a beneficial effect on our mental and physical well-being.

Young people also have a right to know that sex is not essential for health and happiness. Some people are asexual. They get by without sex and that’s fine. However, pupils should know that most people find that regular, fulfilling sex lifts their spirits and enhances their lives and relationships.

Overcoming Sex Shame to Tackle Abuse

Sexual guilt, most of it religious-inspired, causes immense human misery— it leads not only to frustrated, unhappy sex lives but actual psychological and physical ill-health. It also helps sustain child sex abuse.

Adults who sexually exploit youngsters often get away with it because the victims feel embarrassed or guilty about sex and are therefore reluctant to report it.

RSE needs to encourage young people to have more open, positive attitudes towards sexual matters and to teach them how to accurately name their body parts, in order to effectively report abuse. Pupils who are knowledgeable about their bodies and feel at ease talking about sex are more likely to disclose abuse and report their abusers.

How to Have Sexual Fulfilment

Good sex isn’t obvious; it has to be learned. In the absence of sufficient practical information from parents and teachers on how to achieve shared sexual pleasure, many young people are turning to pornography, with its unrealistic and often degrading images.

To ensure happier, more fulfilled relationships in adulthood, RSE for pupils aged 16-plus should include advice on how to achieve mutually fulfilling, high-quality sex, including the emotional and erotic value of foreplay; the multitude of erogenous zones and how to excite them; and the various methods to achieve pleasure for oneself and one’s partner. This is particularly important for boys who often know little about female sexual anatomy and how to give a female partner fulfilment.

Ethical Framework: Mutual Consent, Respect & Fulfilment

It is important that RSE acknowledges diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and relationship types, while also giving teenagers guidance on their rights and responsibilities—including teaching about consent and abuse issues.

A positive ethical framework for sex can be summed up in three very simple principles: mutual consent, reciprocal respect, and shared fulfilment.

The great advantage of these three principles is that they apply universally, regardless of whether people are married or single, monogamous or promiscuous, heterosexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian, trans, or intersex.

Promoting Safer Alternatives: Oral Sex & Mutual Masturbation

If schools are serious about cutting the incidence of teen pregnancies, abortions, and HIV and other sexual infections, they should highlight to pupils aged 16 and older the various safer, healthier alternatives to vaginal and anal intercourse.

Oral sex and mutual masturbation, for example, carry no risk of conception and a much lower risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The most effective way to persuade teenagers to switch to these alternatives is by making them sound and look appealing, glamorous, and sexy. Teachers need to explain that they are not a sacrifice or second best; that they can also be sexually fulfilling. It’s time to talk up and emphasise their advantages over intercourse: no worries about unwanted pregnancies, reduced HIV risk, and no need to use the pill or condoms.

While mutual masturbation is very safe, young people should be made aware that oral sex is safer than intercourse but not entirely risk-free.

Lessons ought also to include the advice that if young people become sexually active it is recommended that they get vaccinated against HPV and hepatitis. These vaccinations should be offered at every school.

Sexual Rights Are Human Rights

RSE should be based on, and espouse, the principle that it is a fundamental human right to love an adult person of any sex or gender identity, to engage in any mutually consensual, harmless sexual act with them, and to share a happy, healthy sex life.

These are the sexual human rights of every person. Everyone also has the human right not to have sex if they do not wish to do so.

Hetero, Homo, and Bi Are Equally Valid

When based on the three principles of mutual consent, respect, and fulfilment between adults, all relationships with persons of any sex are equally morally valid.

While schools should not promote any particular sexual orientation, they should encourage understanding and acceptance of heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, and pansexual orientations—and transgender and intersex identities. This is vital to ensure self-acceptance by pupils with such orientations or identities, and to help combat prejudice, discrimination, bullying, and hate crime.

The Right to Sexual Self-Determination

The principle ‘It’s my body and my right to control it’ should be promoted in every school to ensure that young people assert their right to determine what they, and others, do with their bodies—including the right to abstain from sex, say ‘no’ to unwanted sex, and to report sexual abusers.

This ethos of sexual self-determination and the ‘right to choose’ is crucial to thwart people who attempt to pressure youngsters into sex, abusive relationships, and risky sex.

Live & Let Live

Human sexuality embraces a glorious diversity of emotions and desires. We are all unique, with our own individual tastes. People are emotionally and sexually fulfilled in a huge variety of different ways.

Providing that sexual behaviour is consensual and between adults, where no one is harmed and the enjoyment is reciprocal, schools should adopt a non-judgemental ‘live and let live’ attitude when teaching RSE.

Advice on Internet Safety

Widespread access to the internet and social media has exposed many young people to pornography and sexting and the risks of grooming, abuse, and online harassment. These issues, and how to stay safe online, need to be a cornerstone of RSE lessons, so that teens can be aware of the dangers and protect themselves.

Pornography

Porn is ubiquitous and easy to access. Most young people have watched it. There needs to be frank discussions about the issue: young people need to be told that it is unrealistic to expect from a partner the sexual acrobatics and hours-long sex of porn stars. Also, the often abusive and humiliating and violent nature of pornography needs to be challenged; it should be explained that this is not the right way to treat a partner and will not lead to a happy, healthy relationship. And it should be made clear that sexual violence is against the law and carries severe penalties.

Respect for Sexual Diversity

Our desires and temperaments are not the same. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach when it comes to sex, love, and relationships. If these fall within the ethical framework of adult mutual consent, respect, and fulfilment, it is not the business of RSE to promote sexual conformity or to neglect the reality of sexual diversity.

Give Pupils All the Facts

Sex education from the age of 16 ought to tell the whole truth about every kind of sex and relationship—including sexual practices that some people may find distasteful, like rimming and bondage.

The purpose of such frankness is not to encourage these practices but to help pupils deal with them if they encounter them in later life. This includes advising them of their right to refuse to participate in sexual practices that they dislike or object to.

Restricted Parental Opt-out

We don’t let parents take their kids out of science or history classes, so why should a parental opt-out be permitted for RSE? Removing pupils from such lessons jeopardises their emotional, sexual, and physical health.

Parents who want to withdraw their children should be required to come to each lesson and physically remove their child, and then bring them back in good time for the next lesson. This way the parental opt-out option is retained but the actual opt-out rate is likely to be reduced.

Conclusion

Most young people say they want earlier, more detailed, and franker RSE lessons. We should listen to their concerns and ensure that schools give them the information they need to protect themselves and their partners. Over to you, Education Secretary.

The post What should schools teach young people about sex? appeared first on The Freethinker.

The culture of intolerance that has grown over time in the UK has undermined the ethos of British schools. As Islamist zealots grow stronger in influence in our society, a number of schools known for their secular, inclusiveness and apolitical approach, such as St Stephen’s Primary School, Parkfield Community School, Batley Grammar School, Kettlethorpe High School, and Barclay Primary School, have been caving into their demands one after the other.

There has been an attempt by Muslim fundamentalists in the UK to politicise educational institutions, in order to gain clout in social and political sphere.  And now these nefarious elements have come out in force to assert their intolerant beliefs under the pretext of religious freedom. They use religious identity and political grievances to subvert the secular democratic system. Unfortunately, innocent school children seem to have become pawns in their hands.

What happened outside the gates of Barclay Primary School in East London late last year illustrates this state of affairs. As reported in the Telegraph, children and parents had been in conflict with the school over its policy of being ‘apolitical’ and monitoring comments in parents’ WhatsApp groups, as well as not allowing the children to wear pro-Palestinian clothing. In December, the school was forced to close early for Christmas by a pro-Palestine protest in support of a boy who arrived at the school wearing a Palestine badge on his coat and refused to take it off. The boy’s mother was from Gaza; his father accused the school of ‘Islamophobia’. Yet neither parents nor protesters seem to have acknowledged the school’s interest in avoiding extremism and safeguarding for all students – or its claims that staff and the school itself had been threatened by ‘malicious fabrications’ and ‘misinformation’. Since then, the school has received threats of violence, arson and a bomb threat.

Given this toxic situation, it was only a matter of time before the Michaela Community School in north London was added to the list of schools singled out for their secular principles and inclusiveness.

Michaela was founded by headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh in 2014. The school, known for its outstanding academic results, is facing a lawsuit for maintaining its longstanding secular character by banning prayers. It is a sad state of affairs that a school known for its excellence has become the target of unfounded charges of prejudice. Among certain religious zealots, particularly Islamists at present, the attitude seems to be that those who defy their dictates must be punished pour encourager les autres.

The manner in which the Michaela case has been framed, with the accusations of victimisation and discrimination against Muslim pupils, demonstrates that Islamists will stop at nothing to bully people into compliance. They use the language of human rights to assert their supremacist beliefs. They attempt to use English legislation pertaining to religious freedom as leverage to force the schools to comply with their requests.

The issue of discipline within the school premises has now turned into a question of whether Muslims have the freedom to practise their religion on their terms. The Muslim author of an article recently published in the Guardian, Nadeine Asbali, castigated Birbalsingh’s supposedly ‘dystopian, sinister vision of multiculturalism’.

But this was not merely a case of students offering prayer in the school. As reported in The Standard, Birbalsingh said that her decision came against a ‘backdrop of events including violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of our teachers’. At one point a brick was even hurled through a teacher’s window. There was also allegedly intimidation of some Muslim pupils by others. The Muslim pupil who sued the school was reportedly suspended for five days in 2023 for threatening to stab another pupil. This suggests that children were being influenced by an extreme Islamist ideology, which cannot but harm the wellbeing of the whole school. Birbalsingh’s intervention was arguably a matter of safeguarding, as well as of fostering inclusion and cohesion among the student body.

Concerningly, the threat posed by religious extremists remains present and has often gone unnoticed. The Commission for Countering Extremism has reportedly revealed that research on radical groups is ‘skewed’ towards the far right. Consequently, Britain has ‘substantial gaps’ in its understanding of Islamist extremism, which has been ‘systemically under-researched’. The CCE also warned that Islamist radicals are attempting to dissuade researchers from writing about them by threatening legal action. This is just like the lawsuit being pursued by the unnamed Michaela student against her school: she may claim that the ban on prayer is discriminatory, but in fact, she, or whoever it might be speculated is behind her, is arguably attempting to exploit human rights law to enforce the sowing of division in the school, against the better judgement of its headmistress.

A highly polarised society where differences are valued more than similarities is a breeding ground for extremists. Parallel legal and educational systems based on extremist religious beliefs are operating in plain sight, contributing to further division in society. Disproportionate emphasis on religious freedoms has given minority ethnic or religious groups too much leeway to live according to their own cultural and religious norms, in disregard of the law, human rights principles and British values. Unfortunately, the main culprits at present are the Islamists.

The Michaela lawsuit and the threats and violence out of which it comes ought to be a wake-up call for progressives. They should acknowledge the perils of being in denial about the threats which Islamist extremism poses to the sort of peace, fair treatment and mutual harmony which are encouraged by a code of school rules that is universally applied, with no exceptions. In a modern secular society, it is surely in everyone’s interests if religion, like politics, is kept out of the classroom.

Asbali argues that the Michaela School prayer ban implies ‘the bleak and frankly insulting assumption that, in order for all of us to live harmoniously, we must become robots with no beliefs or ideas of our own’. But this arguably misrepresents the case. It is not a question of what pupils believe – that is, of course, their own business, as Birbalsingh would surely allow. It is a question of their public actions while in school, where a multitude of different considerations may apply, and headteachers must not be unduly shackled by religious demands.

Freedom of belief is one thing – but freedom of manifesting a belief is another. Article 9, paragraph 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights itself makes this plain, stipulating that ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society’ for various reasons, including to protect ‘public safety’ and ‘the rights and freedoms of others.’

It may also be that, as Asbali says, some Muslims believe that the five-times daily prayer ritual ‘will be one of the first things we will be questioned about by God after we die.’ However, is at least questionable whether children are obliged to fulfil this ritual. More fundamentally, it is open to debate whether points of religious doctrine like this one, which are based on nothing but ancient traditional authority and faith with no evidence, should be allowed to take precedence over concerns for the wellbeing of a mixed group of children in the here and now.

The Michaela case is but the latest in a string of incidents at schools in the UK to pose the question of how far religious exceptionalism should be allowed to interfere with the good running of a school and the wellbeing of its whole community. The High Court will have to decide whether Birbalsingh’s policies have struck the balance fairly. In the meantime, the question remains how many other schools and headteachers will have the bravery and tenacity to stand up against the threats of litigation, or worse, from religious extremists. As things stand now, the storm of threats looks to be a long way from abating.

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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.

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.

Introduction

Bradlaugh and Holyoake were the two men under whose leadership the Secularist movement was created and shaped. But their reputations, in their lifetimes and since, have suffered mixed fortunes. In this article I shall reassess their historical importance more generally as radicals and as freethinkers. I shall first compare them as leaders of the Secularist movement, and then examine how changing historical perspectives have shaped their posthumous reputations.

Contrasting reputations

Holyoake was the older of the two men, born in 1817. He also lived longer, dying in 1906 – and this is important. Bradlaugh was half a generation younger, born in 1833 and dying at the relatively young age of 57 in 1891. Bradlaugh died when the achievements of his prime years were still fresh in the memory of friends and foes alike. Holyoake died when many of his achievements were half-forgotten, having achieved ‘grand old man’ status. Kind things might be said about him, but he had outlived his usefulness.

When I first studied these men in the 1960s, Bradlaugh was the better-known of the two, largely on account of his struggle to take the Oath of Allegiance when elected to the House of Commons in 1880, which had recently been given scholarly treatment by Walter Arnstein in The Bradlaugh Case (1965). Bradlaugh was also respected and revered as the founding President of the National Secular Society, the centenary of which in 1966 was celebrated by the then-President, David Tribe, in his 100 Years of Freethought (1967), to be followed by his adulatory biography, President Charles Bradlaugh MP (1971). It seemed like heresy within the freethought movement to question the greatness of this undoubtedly great man.

Holyoake, by contrast, was recalled – if at all – through his association with the Co-operative movement, as its much-published historian. The headquarters of the Co-operative Union in Manchester were in Holyoake House; I recall, as a child, that my junior school near the local co-op store was next to a street called Holyoake Terrace. What was known of his freethought past came through footnote references to his first two-volume autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (1892), followed by his second, even more self-justifying account, Bygones Worth Remembering (1905), many of which were not.

Both men left daughters to defend their reputations; both men left copious archives which I have catalogued; and both men were given friendly biographies within a few years of their deaths – both of which were to some extent written to defend their subject against the actions and views of the other. As an ‘outsider’ to the movement, little did I realise that, when I set out to rediscover ‘George Jacob Holyoake and the Origins of the Secularist Movement’ in 1965, I was entering a polemical minefield as well as a fascinating field of historical study, little-known in the wider world of historical scholarship. Over the next few years I was to receive nothing but kindness and generous help from Bill McIlroy, then secretary of the National Secular Society, and from Nicolas Walter of the Rationalist Press Association, as I proceeded to study first Holyoake and then Bradlaugh.

George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906)

I. The young Owenite lecturer and educator

Holyoake was born in Birmingham, the son of a skilled workman, and (apart from Sunday School) was educated as a young man at the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute, where he experienced strong Unitarian influences. He also encountered the ideas of Robert Owen and became a lecturer for the Owenite Association of All Classes of All Nations. The typically sweeping title of this Owenite organisation was also its manifesto. Owenism introduced the young Holyoake to a new moral world of co-operation beyond the narrowing confines of class. Birmingham in the 1830s was a centre of radical political activity, but under the leadership of men like Thomas Attwood and Joseph Sturge it was a radicalism that sought to be a movement of all classes, bridging the gap between working-class and middle-class reformers.

Moderation and a belief that the path to social and political advancement lay through reason and education was at the heart of Holyoake’s early experiences. He was an educator. Three of his early publications in the 1840s can be seen as embodying the trivium of the classical curriculum: Grammar (The Handbook of Grammar), Logic (A Logic of Facts) and Rhetoric (Rudiments of Public Speaking and Debate). He also published Mathematics no mystery; or the Beauties of Euclid. His preference for the title of his later autobiography was Sixty Years of an Educator’s Life, but his publisher (T. Fisher Unwin) thought ‘agitator’ would make the book more saleable.

II. The path to atheism

Little of this moderation was immediately apparent. An attack on the Owenite lecturing structure in 1841, orchestrated by the Bishop of Exeter in the House of Lords, led to the ‘social missionary’ (i.e. Owenite lecturer) in Bristol, Charles Southwell, being prosecuted and imprisoned for blasphemy on account of an attack on the Bible (which he called the ‘Jew Book’) in his unofficial weekly periodical, the Oracle of Reason. Holyoake stepped forward to edit the paper, as much to champion freedom of speech as to maintain Southwell’s extreme views.

Holyoake’s Owenite rejection of Christian theology became embittered by events over the next few years. He was himself prosecuted for blasphemy following a flippant reply to a question about the place of religion in an Owenite community, in which he said the people were too poor to have a God, and he declared himself to be without any religion at all. While he was in gaol for this comment, his elder daughter died.

His rejection of religion was partly intellectual, but it was enhanced by Christian bigotry, hypocrisy and what he described as ‘persecution’. Holyoake was a stubborn man and never wavered from his rejection of religion. Over the years, however, his range of acquaintances and experiences widened; and while the memory of his early treatment at the hands of Christians never faded, some of the bitterness did, and the ‘all classes of all nations’ side to his outlook reasserted itself. Holyoake was a born moderate, yet however accommodating he became in later life towards those with whom he disagreed, and however keen he might have seemed to compromise with the world, he never renounced his atheism. The world eventually had to accept him on his own terms. That he was eventually accepted was as much a sign of the changing times as of the changing Holyoake: he was on the right side of progress.

III. The leader of freethought

Following his imprisonment he enjoyed his reputation, lecturing as a ‘martyr’ to the cause of freethought, but it rapidly became apparent that his forte was writing and organisation. He was not a good public speaker. Having a weak high-pitched voice, he was no orator. His words were stilettos not broadswords, and his witty pinpricks, aimed sometimes as much at rival freethinkers as at the enemies of freethought, irritated many.

His first achievement as an organiser was to gather up the remnants of Owenite branches and bring them together in an organisation to promote freedom of expression and the philosophy of Rationalism, by which he meant Owenism shorn of its discredited communitarian ideas. Out of this grew his two major contributions to radical organisation: the promotion of freethought as an intellectual and civil rights movement, renamed ‘Secularism’, in 1851; and the encouragement of economic co-operation among both producers and consumers, which led to his increasing identification with the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ (whose history, Self Help by the People, he published in 1858) and the nascent co-operative movement.

IV. Secularism and the Reasoner

This activity was maintained through publication, chiefly a weekly periodical entitled the Reasoner, which he edited from 1846 until 1861. The manifesto issued in the very first number of this octavo periodical remained at its core throughout: ‘Communistic in Social Economy – Utilitarian in Morals – Republican in Politics – and Anti-theological in Religion’. By ‘Communistic’ he meant Owenite Socialism, but with co-operation in the community rather than co-operation in communities; by ‘Utilitarian’, he meant the moral philosophy of Jeremy Bentham as developed by John Stuart Mill, taking the promotion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the measure of an ethical life; by ‘Republican’ he meant democratic government of the people, for the people, by the people; and by ‘Anti-theological’ he meant an intellectual rejection of all supernatural explanations of the natural world.

V. Radical politics

Although much of his work in both Secularism and Co-operation grew from his Owenite roots, Holyoake was also active in the wider radical political movement: Chartism at home and republicanism abroad. His emphasis varied according to circumstances, with politics occupying much of his time around 1848 and again in the later 1850s.

During the 1840s he was a Chartist, supporting the democratic movement for the extension of the franchise to all men, but the mainstream National Charter Association led by Feargus O’Connor was not to his taste. O’Connor’s demagoguery and readiness to use the threat of violence were incompatible with Holyoake’s rational and intellectual approach, which favoured building bridges with moderate reformers rather than alienating them. Was this an unprincipled urge to compromise, or strategically sensible? His opponents within the radical and freethought movements thought the former, and detected in Holyoake too great a readiness to be flattered by the company of reformers of a higher social class. One might suggest that he thought himself the better of his equals and the equal of his betters.

VI. Moderating influences

This became clear as Chartism declined after the failure of the Third Petition in 1848. In association with three of the six authors of the original Charter in 1838 (James Watson, Henry Hetherington and Richard Moore) Holyoake was a founder-member of the People’s Charter Union and co-editor with the Mazzinian republican, William James Linton, of a short-lived Chartist newspaper, the Cause of the People. This development was metropolitan in origin and nature, and opposed to the O’Connorite National Charter Association and Northern Star, which drew on nationwide support, especially in the manufacturing districts of the North.

Holyoake undertook provincial lecture tours, mainly at the invitation of former Owenites whom he was organising into what became Secularism after 1851. However, by 1850 he had in fact become a London-based publisher and journalist, with increasing connections to the metropolitan intellectual radicalism of William Henry Ashurst, Robert Owen’s solicitor, whose home at Muswell Hill was a centre of Mazzinian activity; and of W. J. Fox of the Unitarian and Rationalist South Place Chapel. It was here that the radical intelligentsia worshipped – including John Stuart Mill and Professor Frank Newman, brother of the later Cardinal. Collet Dobson Collet, a leading member of the People’s Charter Union, was choirmaster at South Place.

These people and their connections had an undoubted influence on Holyoake; they also helped fund his activities and supplied material for his weekly Reasoner. He in turn wrote for the Leader, a weekly middle-class periodical which ran throughout the 1850s, edited by Thornton Hunt, son of the radical poet, Leigh Hunt.

As Holyoake faced up to the failures of the politics of the 1830s and 1840s and the decline of Owenism and Chartism, he became more compromising and expedient in his strategy, whilst never abandoning his ultimate ideals. But many fellow Chartists and increasing numbers of freethinkers criticised his approach, which they saw as weak and ineffective.

Holyoake collaborated with middle-class and parliamentary radicals, including Richard Cobden and John Bright, in the continuing movement to extend the franchise, repeal the newspaper stamp and advertisement duties – the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ – and achieve public secular elementary education. This experience convinced him that this was the way to achieve progress. In addition, through the emerging co-operative movement he learnt he could even work with Christian Socialists. So the philosophy of Secularism evolved, taking its name from the Secular Education movement. As the Reasoner proclaimed at the beginning of 1853: ‘Secularism is the province of the real, the known, the useful, and the affirmative. It is the practical side of scepticism.’ He continued to believe that religious doctrines and theologies were in error, but saw no reason for them to be a bar to his working with people of all faiths and none to achieve practical, secular reforms.

VII. The growth of Secularism in the 1850s

This new approach was not without its critics. However, it began well when attacks by Christian lecturers gave Secularism publicity and brought in wider audiences. For six nights in January and February 1853, Holyoake debated in London with a Congregationalist lecturer, Brewin Grant, the question, ‘What advantages would accrue to mankind generally, and the working classes in particular, by the removal of Christianity, and the substitution of Secularism in its place?’ The event was so successful that it was repeated in Glasgow in February 1854. There the question was, ‘Is Secularism inconsistent with reason and the moral sense, and condemned by experience?’ The circulation of the Reasoner doubled, peaking at around 5,000. The word ‘Secularist’ in Holyoake’s sense entered the English language, and was used in the official Report of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, published in 1853. In this Report, the masses of non-church-goers were described as ‘unconscious Secularists’, a phrase which Holyoake dismissed as an oxymoron: for him, Secularism was a conscious intellectual choice.

VIII. Faltering leadership

But as fickle public attention switched to other matters, notably the Crimean War, which divided radical opinion, the wider interest in Secularism began to fade and numbers fell. Furthermore, Holyoake was caught up with other concerns, such as the continental struggle for freedom following the defeat of the European Revolutions of 1848-9. These matters consumed an increasing amount of his time, until by 1860 he was almost wholly occupied as acting secretary for the Garibaldi Committee, which organised a volunteer legion to fight with Garibaldi in the liberation of Italy from Austrian rule. As Holyoake’s leadership of Secularism faltered, so his critics became more vocal. The movement to revive the former Owenite branches, which he had started, had grown in areas of former Owenite strength in the textile areas of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire and the East Midlands. There were over thirty localities reporting societies, and lectures taking place in as many more again, but Holyoake’s leadership was lacking in vigour and popular appeal. He was operating a pressure group for reform; they wanted to fight a campaign.

Enter Charles Bradlaugh

Meanwhile, in the East End of London, an unknown youth was beginning to attract attention. A hostile Christian paper described him in 1850 as:

‘an overgrown boy of seventeen, with such an uninformed mind, that it is really amusing to see him sometimes stammering and spluttering on in his own ignorant eloquence, making the most ludicrous mistakes, making all history to suit his private convenience, and often calling yea nay and nay yea, when it will suit his purpose.’

At the end of the decade, following an erudite lecture on ‘Has man a soul?’ at Sheffield, the local Secular Society secretary reported of this same youth:

‘he stands 6 feet 1, is about 25 years of age & has done terrible execution with both the Bible & the Saints. Ministers of religion … have been so many play things in his hands, he takes no notes & the Sledge Hammer falls heavily sharpened with wit & tempered with eloquence.’

This was Charles Bradlaugh.

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891)

I. Early years

Bradlaugh was born in East London in 1833 to lower-middle class parents. He had little formal education and learnt his freethought on the street corners of London. When he left home, he went to lodge with the freethinker Eliza Sharples, relict of the freethought republican publisher and prisoner, Richard Carlile, and their daughters, Hypatia and Theophila. After army service in Ireland, he worked as a solicitor’s clerk. Though never articled, over the years, through extensive reading, he acquired a considerable knowledge of the law. This, when allied to his debating powers, made him a formidable figure in the law courts.

Bradlaugh rapidly became a leader in the Secularist movement, giving new strength to those who found Holyoake weak and ineffective. In 1861 Sheffield invited him to become junior editor of a new paper, the National Reformer. After an interlude of three years from 1863, during which time the editor was John Watts of Bristol, Bradlaugh assumed full control of the paper in 1866, transforming it into a high-class 16-page 2d. review and doubling its circulation in five years to around 6,000.

II. The National Secular Society

In 1866, Bradlaugh also made himself the indispensable founder-president of the National Secular Society. Holyoake had spent years trying to build up the movement nationally as a federation of independent local societies, but failed to establish any stable national organisation. Bradlaugh and Charles Watts cut the Gordian knot in 1866, announcing the formation of a new society, the National Secular Society, with themselves as temporary president and secretary respectively, and promising to call a Conference as soon as 1000 members had been enrolled. Local Societies were subsequently allowed to form branches and enrol their members at a reduced fee.

A few local societies remained wholly independent, but most simply became branches of the NSS. The two most notable exceptions were Leicester and Huddersfield, both societies with strong Owenite roots and a continuing loyalty to Holyoake. For the most part Holyoake was sidelined, confined to sniping from the wings when the occasion presented itself. There were three reasons for this. First, the temperamental differences between the two men; second, intellectual differences over the nature of Secularism and Holyoake’s dismay at seeing his creation bent to the new man’s will; and third, I suspect, Holyoake’s outright jealousy at Bradlaugh’s success.

Bradlaugh and Holyoake compared

The two men were very different. In stature, Bradlaugh was a giant of a man; Holyoake merely average in height and of slight build. Bradlaugh had the loud voice necessary for controlling a large crowd, especially out of doors; Holyoake’s weak voice was not suited to such oratory. Bradlaugh was confident in his opinions, believing himself (usually correctly) to be right; Holyoake appeared more considered, temporising, even evasive, and willing to trim according to changing circumstances over time. Bradlaugh could be ruthless; Holyoake could be irritating.

III. Early setbacks

In the early 1870s, Bradlaugh’s movement was in danger of slipping backwards. He was increasingly involved in politics, and also had personal and financial problems. In 1871 he declined to be nominated as NSS president, and Watts similarly withdrew as secretary.  Bradlaugh’s successor, the aristocratic radical Arthur Trevelyan, was no substitute. The NSS became practically defunct, with Bradlaugh and Watts keeping the movement going through their lectures and the National Reformer.

IV. Enter Annie Besant (1847-1933)

A revival began when Watts and Bradlaugh resumed office in 1874, with the latter now totally in control. The opportunity to demonstrate this came in 1876 when a publication advocating birth control by the American, Dr Charles Knowlton, of which Watts was nominally the publisher, was prosecuted. Watts’s wife Kate, the daughter of a Nottingham freethinker, was the ‘leading lady’ in the NSS at that time (Bradlaugh was already separated from his alcoholic wife, who died in 1877). Watts pleaded guilty and both he and Kate were driven out of the movement by Bradlaugh, and a relative newcomer to Freethought, Mrs Annie Besant, took Kate’s place. Annie was the young estranged wife of a clergyman, with a will and energy to match those of Bradlaugh himself. Kate Watts was not the only woman to feel pushed out: the same was true of Bradlaugh’s daughters, Alice and Hypatia, who were then emerging into adulthood as worthy followers and supporters of their father. For the next decade, Annie Besant was to be Charles Bradlaugh’s rock and staff and shield.

V. Bradlaugh and Parliament

Bradlaugh needed this. He had been contemplating a parliamentary career since 1868. Having finally been elected for Northampton in 1880, he suddenly found that the Speaker of the House of Commons would not permit him, as one who had declared his unbelief in God and who therefore thought the oath meaningless, to swear the oath of allegiance and so take his seat. The story of the next six years is well known and not my direct concern here.

During these years of struggle, Bradlaugh exhibited extraordinary legal skill, physical courage and stubborn determination. Again and again, he went back to his constituents to be re-elected, and again and again, he defied the parliamentary authorities to exclude him. The principal opposition came from a minority of Conservative members, who were determined to use the Bradlaugh case to disrupt the legislative programme of Gladstone’s Liberal government. When there was a Conservative government and a new Speaker in 1886, Bradlaugh was permitted to take the oath without question, and was to be a hard-working MP for the next five years.

Not all Secularists were pleased by Bradlaugh’s stand. Holyoake thought an atheist republican should not be fighting for the right to swear a religious oath to the Crown but should have stood on principle for the right of the electors to send whomsoever they wished to the Commons. There was an ironic symmetry here, with the expedient Holyoake standing on principle against the principled Bradlaugh’s expediency.

But the general effect of this parliamentary struggle was to enhance Bradlaugh’s radical credentials. It also raised the profile and membership of the NSS, as well as the circulation of the National Reformer.

VI. Enter George William Foote (1850-1915)

This success was augmented by the decision of a future leader of the next generation, George William Foote, to throw aside his moderate literary approach to freethought and start a new 1d. weekly, the Freethinker, which reverted to the older style of an anti-religious blend of humour and propaganda.

VII. Birth control

In her support for birth control information, Annie Besant was principally interested in the neo-Malthusian control of the population as an answer to the problem of poverty. Bradlaugh agreed, but wished to challenge the prosecution of the Knowlton pamphlet in 1876 on the grounds of freedom of publication. At the same time, he had also long been committed to the publication of guides to sexual knowledge and contraception. As early as 1861 he was championing George Drysdale’s publication, Elements of Social Science, which is more accurately described by its original title of 1854, Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion.

This support for such literature, and more widely for neo-Malthusian economics, separated Bradlaugh both from socialists, who blamed capitalism, not population growth, for poverty, and from Holyoake and his supporters in the Secularist movement, who viewed with horror the undermining of their argument that being without God did not mean being without morals. As usual, by dint of an iron will to make his point – coupled with skilful legal ruses – Bradlaugh succeeded in 1877, rallying the Secularist movement around him and Besant, before going on to further victory in his parliamentary struggle.

All this came at a price. In what should have been his prime of life, Bradlaugh was prematurely aged. He died of kidney disease on 30 January 1891, the same day, appropriately, on which another Charles had met his death in 1649.

Contrasting legacies

These, then, were the two men who created the Secularist movement: George Jacob Holyoake, the originator of the movement; and Charles Bradlaugh, the man who developed it and founded the National Secular Society. Their legacies are as contrasting as their lives.

Holyoake is largely remembered through his own writings for his lifetime of radical agitation, and as the man who encouraged and publicised the spread of consumers’ co-operation throughout Britain and across the world. If his contribution to freethought is acknowledged, it is embodied in the Rationalist Press Association, founded in 1899 by Charles Watts’s son, Charles Albert Watts, with Holyoake as first Chairman. This organisation represented through its publications the educational and rational wing of freethought, closest to Holyoake’s own temperament and outlook.

Bradlaugh is chiefly remembered for his parliamentary struggle, although his legacy organisation, the NSS, still survives. The NSS represents the more campaigning side of freethought, though in the modern humanist movement the two aspects are merging into one. With the decline of Christianity as the dominant cultural force in British society, the need for Bradlaugh’s style of militant atheism has declined. In today’s secular world the attractions of Holyoake’s positive philosophy of Secularism have again become more relevant to a reinterpretation of our current condition, confused as it is by the many cross-currents of a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. In a world of religious contests and conflicts, the secular can hold the common central ground.

Holyoake and Bradlaugh in recent historical writings

I. Holyoake the champion of the co-operative commonwealth

What is interesting about this revival in the relevance of Holyoake’s approach is the way in which his recent contribution to the co-operative movement has also been reassessed. The first of three volumes by Stephen Yeo on A Useable Past: a history of association, co-operation and education for un-statist socialism in 19^th and 20^th century Britain, is entitled Victorian Agitator. George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906): Co-operation as ‘The New Order of Life’. Yeo was Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford (1989-97) and then Chair of the Co-operative College and of the Co-operative Heritage Trust (1999-2015). In his book, published in 2017, Yeo turns to Holyoake for guidance in two major crises of the present day: the crisis of Socialism and the crisis of the Co-operative Movement.

The crisis of Socialism arises firstly from the fact that the Marxism that Yeo once embraced has now been discredited by the collapse of those Communist state powers which annexed it in the first part of the twentieth century. Secondly, the Labour Party in Britain is still searching for an alternative socialist philosophy to the managerial state capitalism of the Fabian founders of Labour.

The crisis of Co-operation comes with the challenge of the big supermarkets (and Amazon) to the ‘Rochdale’ model in a world of consumerist capitalism.

Holyoake’s vision was of a co-operative commonwealth based on secularity, mutual respect and democratic sharing. Yeo finds in this an attractive alternative way forward; his book represents the clearest appreciation of Holyoake’s ethical and philosophical as well as political and economic thinking. The Association of All Classes of All Nations, that Owenite dream mediated by Holyoake, might still be the way forward for a disjointed society and world.

II. Freethought enters the historical mainstream

But if Holyoake the educator is to be taken seriously once more, what of Bradlaugh? Over the past half century since I began work on the Secularist organisations of Holyoake and Bradlaugh, the subject has seen an explosion of scholarly publications, many of them emanating from America. Secularism and Atheism as philosophies, moral systems and personal experiences have been explored and analysed until they have become part of the mainstream of historical and sociological writing.

In Britain we owe a debt to the likes of Callum G. Brown, Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, a social historian specialising in secularisation and Humanism in nineteenth and twentieth century western society. His most recent book is Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (2017). We also owe a debt to David Nash, history professor at Oxford Brookes University, who began as my research student and whose first book, based on his PhD thesis, was on the Leicester Secular Society (1992). He has since gone on to publish several works on the history of blasphemy, most recently in 2020, as well as numerous articles.

III. Bradlaugh, the forgotten radical

But there has been no reassessment of Bradlaugh himself. Even the most recent and best biography, Dare to Stand Alone. The story of Charles Bradlaugh, Atheist and Republican by Bryan Niblett (2010), takes the interpretation little further, although it shows a clear understanding and appreciation of Bradlaugh’s legal skills (Niblett is a barrister). What is lacking is a new appreciation among historians who specialise in the wider radical and labour movement of Bradlaugh’s place in their story. An important exception is a book by Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1915 (2009), where Bradlaugh’s significance in the 1870s and 1880s is acknowledged and integrated into the wider narrative.

Why has Bradlaugh been neglected?

There are good reasons for this general neglect of Bradlaugh as a mainstream radical.

First, Bradlaugh was a Radical in the tradition of Thomas Paine, but he came at the end of that tradition. He was an individualist, suspicious of state power and in favour of low taxation and sound monetary policy. He favoured the world of the small, independent artisan and shopkeeper, who regarded Political Economy as a liberating science – what William Cobbett condemned as ‘Scotch Feelosophy’. As the nature and needs of British society and the economy changed, with the growth of large-scale industrial capitalism, the social problems of urbanisation, and the spread of socialist ideas, this strand of radicalism looked to the past rather than the future. Or if it had a future, it was in the outlook of a Grantham shopkeeper and Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism; or Liz Truss’s path from Liberal Democrat to Conservative. Labour historians did not warm to this style of individualistic radicalism. Bradlaugh did not fit their narrative.

Secondly, historians of the twentieth century, which saw universal suffrage with one person one vote finally accomplished in Britain only in 1948, have been captivated by the study of Chartism, which failed in 1848 but which left a legacy to be picked up by succeeding generations. Bradlaugh was of the next generation, but the narrative told by most mainstream historians has leapt ahead to the rise of political labour and the making of the Labour Party at the start of the twentieth century, with its ideological underpinning of socialism and links with radical Christianity.

On this approach, Bradlaugh lived through an interlude, seen as a time of Liberal hegemony, the era of William Ewart Gladstone. Bradlaugh did not fit this narrative either, except where it bumped into Gladstone’s second ministry between 1880 and 1885. Bradlaugh championed Irish nationalism, but as an atheist did not fit their Catholic narrative; and he championed Indian nationalism, but – unlike Annie Besant – did not live long enough to be part of its rise in the twentieth century. It was a very young Gandhi who attended Bradlaugh’s funeral in 1891.

Thus, whereas Holyoake can now be written back into a narrative of the co-operative commonwealth, Bradlaugh still remains to be interpreted within the broader political history of British radicalism.

Bradlaugh compared with Feargus O’Connor

The great leader of Chartism was Feargus O’Connor. His reputation has grown in recent years as the man who drew together the strands of protest in the anti-poor law and ten-hours movements, and united them with London radicalism to create the most powerful democratic protest movement of the nineteenth century. His tools were a newspaper, the Northern Star, an organisation, the National Charter Association, and a method of popular outreach, the Mass Platform. The latter involved large-scale outdoor meetings addressed by popular orators, who were thereby able to reach those who could neither read newspapers nor afford to join organisations, or could not ordinarily be bothered to do so.

A comparison between O’Connor and Bradlaugh is instructive, but seldom made. O’Connor had the Northern Star as his mouthpiece, with which to publicise himself and his version of Chartism to great effect. The National Reformer was not, after its initial issues, a newspaper at all but a periodical with a far smaller circulation. But on every other count I would argue that Bradlaugh was O’Connor’s superior.

In his maturity he was a better outdoor speaker, powerfully effective without O’Connor’s bluster and demagoguery; he was consequently also able to adapt to be a far better indoor speaker; and he became a master of speaking and operating in the House of Commons, where O’Connor was an abject failure. Bradlaugh’s Parliamentary achievements were considerable. These include his Oaths Act of 1888, which lies at the heart of the parliamentary swearing-in ceremony for a majority of MPs today; and also his hard work on Select Committees and even a Royal Commission.

Bradlaugh, in other words, was a popular orator turned all-round politician. Yet O’Connor – whom Holyoake saw through from the start – is the hero of many historians, while Bradlaugh is almost forgotten. But if I were asked to name the two greatest political platform orators of the nineteenth century, other than William Gladstone and John Bright, I would nominate Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant.

Did the politics of the Mass Platform fade after 1848?

The Mass Platform had been developed by Henry Hunt and sanctified by the blood of martyrs at the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Historians have associated the failure of Chartism in 1848 with the collapse of the Mass Platform.

True, there were many changes in circumstances in the second half of the nineteenth century. The context for the propagation of radical views was changing: the abolition of the Newspaper Stamp in 1855 gave rise to a new popular press, with several papers vying for the national market that the Northern Star had once dominated – notably Reynolds’s News but also the Daily News and even the Liberal Daily Telegraph. The railway network made lectures out of London easier and more frequent. The country was better policed.

Yet mass meetings did continue into the 1850s and beyond. ‘Is it forgotten how many have met at Blackstone Edge, at Skircoat Moor and at Shipley Glen?’ asked the Yorkshire Tribune, A Monthly Journal of Democracy and Secularism for the People, in 1855. ‘It will be so again when we give the call.’ And so it was, in association with the various campaigns from 1858 onwards in support of parliamentary reform. Secularists played a leading part in organising these mass meetings, modelled on the camp meetings of the Primitive Methodists.

Bradlaugh and radicalism

As well as a favoured speaker on these occasions, Bradlaugh (as well as Holyoake) was on the Council of the Reform League. Bradlaugh was one of those who urged the League in 1867 to call the government’s bluff and hold a prohibited meeting in Hyde Park. This proved effective in securing the passage of the Second Reform Bill through the House of Commons, extending the vote to all male householders in parliamentary boroughs.

In the early 1870s, Bradlaugh again took the lead in the anti-aristocratic movements for land reform and republicanism, with local Secularists and NSS branches setting up Republican Clubs. This was one reason why the NSS faltered in these years, as energies were diverted into politics. Then again, and above all, Bradlaugh’s parliamentary struggle in the early 1880s brought him and his NSS to the forefront, with mass rallies in support of their leader and parliamentary reform more generally, which contributed significantly to the passage of the Third Reform Act in 1884. This, together with the Redistribution Act of 1885, extended the adult male vote to all householders. It enfranchised, for the first time, many Secularists and others who lived in small industrial towns and villages, and who were the backbone of the Secularist radical movement.

So when historians look for the reasons why radicalism appeared weak after Chartism, they are asking the wrong question. They have underestimated both the extent to which Holyoake had successfully rallied former Owenites and Chartists in the 1850s, and the extent to which Bradlaugh then led them to greater heights and influence in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Even in the later 1880s, when socialists began to infiltrate and establish clubs in London and elsewhere, their numbers were minute compared with the numbers in London’s radical clubs and Secularist societies in the country.

The Secularists began to lose the initiative only after Bradlaugh’s death. Their strategic mistake was that they had little to offer the trade unions, on whose support socialists were to build a new Labour Party after 1900. By focusing on this alternative labour history, historians have forgotten Bradlaugh.

Conclusion

I would therefore argue that, in their different ways, both Holyoake and Bradlaugh, in addition to their creation and expansion of the Secularist movement, contributed much to the progress of the working class more generally. Their role was central in the co-operative movement and in the promotion of extra-parliamentary radicalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead of dwelling on their personal rivalry and the merits of their differing versions of Secularism, we need to recognise the wider significance of both men. Holyoake’s co-operative star may once more be in the ascendant. Perhaps Bradlaugh’s importance to radicalism may also soon be more widely recognised.

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One morning I found myself at a bus stop in the suburbs of East Belfast, feeling rather disconcerted. Next to me on the bench was a small leaflet which announced the love of Jesus, secured by an irregularly shaped pebble. It had been left there by an elderly man, now quietly trudging away down the street. After leaving, I had spent over a decade living in Scotland, statistically the least religious part of the British Isles. I had recently arrived back to work on an LGBT history project and found myself having to readjust to life in Northern Ireland.

It is hard to ignore the presence of Christianity here. It ranges from small signals of everyday piety and confessional identities to the frequent presence of religious signs in political discourse. A browse through a recent edition of a local newspaper in County Down brought me to the ‘religious matters’ page. One of its features was a redemption narrative of female transgression which had been contributed by a local reader. The story told of the ‘sin’ of an unmarried woman in the city and her subsequent conversion and joyful reunion with her family in the countryside; the article would not have been out of place in the 1950s. Some of the most egregious voices in Christianity shout the loudest. It would be hard, for instance, to avoid the homophobic ravings of fundamentalist preachers in Belfast city centre on a Saturday afternoon. A plethora of churches dot their way across town and country; those belonging to fringe Protestant churches are amongst the most conspicuous.

Yet the results of the 2021 census show that secularisation is gathering pace. Most commentary thus far has focused upon a key demographic shift. Catholics now outnumber Protestants for the first time, a development with profound political implications for a statelet which was designed to deliver a permanent Protestant electoral majority. The increasing Catholic population does not translate in a surge of enthusiasm for the Catholic Church. As in the Republic of Ireland, it is indicative of an ethnic identity which is ever further divorced from religious adherence.

Commentators have given less attention to another feature of the census: the increasing number of people in Northern Ireland who state that they do not have a religion. When they were asked what ‘religion, denomination or body’ they belonged to, 330,983 people ticked ‘none’ in response, compared with 183,164 in 2011. This represents an 80 per cent increase in the number of the non-religious in the space of a decade. Furthermore, there has been an increase in the number of people who report that they were not raised in a religion. According to the census, the total number of those who stated their upbringing was not religious rose from 6,600 in 2001 to 28,500 in 2022. The non-religious now comprise 17.4 per cent of the total population.

Protestant decline

Commentary on the census by David Marshall, Director of Census and Population Statistics at the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, has emphasised that the changing religious demography of Northern Ireland has in part been driven by age structures. Analysis of the 2011 census demonstrated that the Catholic population was on average younger and that there was a higher number of births than deaths. The pattern was reversed for Protestants, with the overall Protestant population decreasing more rapidly than it was being renewed. The declining membership of the mainstream Protestant churches is therefore underpinned by an overall decrease in population for them to recruit from.

However, the census data for the decline of the major Protestant churches indicates a more complex story of secularisation and shifting political identities. Strikingly, the non-religious are now more numerous than adherents of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. In the mid-twentieth century, membership of the Presbyterians surpassed that of any other Protestant church in Northern Ireland. In the early 2000s, the non-religious overtook the number of those who identified themselves with the Church of Ireland, an Anglican body which shares heritage and doctrine with the Church of England due to the legacy of English colonialism. The two major churches in Northern Ireland have experienced long-term decline since the 1960s. Back then, as the 2021 census again shows, the Presbyterian Church garnered the affections of around 30 per cent of the population and the Church of Ireland, 25 per cent. Only 11.5 per cent of the population now identify themselves with the Church of Ireland and 16.6 per cent with the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

While it seems unlikely that all of those who say that they have ‘no religion’ were formerly associated with these two churches, it seems probable that the vast majority were. The decline of ‘national’ churches is a typical symptom of secularisation. These organisations once claimed the default adherence of large numbers of people, but as the social power of religion has diminished, the imperative has dwindled for individuals who are less religious to claim that they identify with a church.

Writing nearly twenty years ago, the sociologist John Brewer observed that the mainstream Protestant churches were suffering from declining participation and reductions in membership. Brewer concluded that patterns of personal religiosity were being affected by broader social changes, declining religious practice, liberalisation in beliefs and other attitudes and behaviour. Religion was retreating into the private sphere; yet nominal identification with Protestantism had remained high. To misquote Grace Davie, a sociologist of religion, this was ‘belonging without believing.’ Yet Brewer highlighted the defection and disenchantment of the youth, noting how the most popular affiliation amongst the young (aged 18-34) was ‘no religion.’ Since then, this trend has continued swiftly, and nominal identification is now eroding away. There has been some growth in the membership of minor Protestant churches and sects – often evangelical and fundamentalist – as well as a small increase in adherents of non-Christian religions. However, this is dwarfed by the decline of the major Protestant churches.

Secularisation and political change

The regional breakdown of the 2021 census results shows that some of the areas of Northern Ireland with the highest percentage of Protestants are also those with the highest percentage of the non-religious. The most irreligious area of the region is currently Ards and North Down, at 32.1 per cent, followed by Lisburn and Castlereagh at 25.3, Mid and East Antrim at 23.9 and Belfast at 23.8.

The secularisation of an ever-increasing proportion of the Protestant population has wrought changes to political as well as religious identities. As discussed in an article by Mary C. Murphy, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland was formed in 1970. It aims to be a non-sectarian political grouping able to appeal to members of all communities. After failing to make a significant breakthrough for many years, it has grown apace in the last twenty. Alliance is a close relative of the Liberal Democrat Party. It combines economic centrism with an advocacy of socially liberal and reformist policies. Recent analysis by Christopher Raymond at Queen’s University Belfast shows a direct correlation between the growth of non-religion and electoral support for Alliance, with both increasing in tandem.

The rise of Alliance has been fuelled by younger and more middle-class ex-Protestant voters who are infuriated with the religiosity and social conservatism of the unionist parties – in particular, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election saw Alliance making gains, notably in Upper Bann, a predominantly rural area previously considered unpromising territory. Here, a twenty-four-year-old councillor, Eóin Tennyson, became the first openly gay Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) to be elected.

The marked increase in the number of the non-religious, recorded in the 2021 Northern Ireland census, reveals the emergence of a more secular society. The growth of non-religion has largely been at the expense of the main Protestant churches; the ranks of the non-religious have now surpassed those of the Presbyterian church, formerly the largest such grouping. Many of the non-religious can be surmised to be younger and likely to adhere to a more socially liberal worldview. Consequently, the statistical rise of non-religion has been accompanied by the increasing electoral fortunes of the Alliance Party, who have successfully capitalised on a growing demographic of people who are alienated by the traditionalism and social conservatism of the two main unionist parties. It seems likely that, as secularisation continues to progress in years to come, support for a more secular and socially liberal politics will increase in tandem.  

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Since 31 January 2021, a new BNO visa has been available to Hong Kong residents holding Hong Kong British National (Overseas) passports. The BNO allows such people to come to the UK with their close family members and stay for five years. After five years of residence in the UK, they will be entitled to apply for settlement (also known as ‘indefinite leave to remain’), and after one further year of residence, to apply for British citizenship.

Oliver and his wife, Jenny, applied for the new visa immediately in July 2021 after getting all the documents and money ready. Oliver was an engineer and Jenny was a primary school teacher. Both were born and educated in Hong Kong.

The cost of applying for a visa to stay for five years is £250. In order to use the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, applicants each need to pay the healthcare surcharge. It costs £3,120 if one is staying for 5 years. For each child under 18 it costs £2,350.

‘We had to get quite a large sum of money ready,’ Oliver says. ‘Apart from the application costs and flight tickets, we also needed to prove we had enough money to pay for our housing and to support ourselves and our family for 6 months.’

‘We have two boys,’ Jenny adds, ‘Adam was six and Bobby was four. You can imagine how much money we needed to get hold of before we start our journey.’

‘But it’s all worth it,’ Oliver continues with a sigh. ‘We are now safe. We didn’t want to see our kids continue with their schooling in Hong Kong, where they have changed the whole curriculum – including all sorts of misinformation trying to brainwash children into believing that Communist China is a “progressive, selfless and united regime”, while denouncing democratic government as a “fierce inter-party rivalry that makes the people suffer”.’

The Chinese Communist Party-backed National Education curriculum required schools to spend up to one quarter of their study time during six years of primary education on activities and talks about patriotism. Oliver was worried that, with this in force, his children would succumb to the negative effects of brainwashing.

Back in May 2011, the Hong Kong Education Bureau announced the introduction of  a ‘Moral and National Education’ (MNE) as a compulsory school subject in primary and secondary schools. ‘National identity’ was one of the priority values that the curriculum reforms proposed should be promoted. The whole MNE programme aimed at instilling in the students a ‘blind patriotism’. Assessment examples included students’ reporting on whether their peers showed emotions, such as tears in their eyes when singing the national anthem and watching the hoisting of the national flag.

‘The learning of the national situations emphasises “affection”, focuses on “feeling” and is based on “emotion”.’  (MNE Curriculum Guide)

Realising the danger of the many elements of indoctrination in the MNE, in 2012, parents, teachers and students formed a ‘Civil Alliance Against the National Education’. They organised protest marches and occupied the Hong Kong government headquarters, where they staged a hunger strike and other demonstration events. Tens of thousands of supporters joined in the occupation, and the Hong Kong Government had to shelve the MNE and proposed a revised version – which, however, included elements similar to the MNE.

‘We know the Communist China Regime and the Hong Kong Government would not give up on controlling what is taught in schools and what to censor,’ says Jenny. ‘So for the sake of our boys, we had to come here to provide them with a more objective style of education. The boys are happy here in local schools, and I don’t have to worry about their getting brainwashed and not being able to develop critical thinking with an open mind.’

Oliver and Jenny are amongst the many young couples with children who have realised that Hong Kong is no longer the city with civil liberties they were promised by the CCP’s regime, as stipulated in the Hong Kong’s Basic Law. The ‘one-country-two-systems’ promise has been nothing but empty words, and the city has very quickly developed into an authoritarian state, just like any other Chinese city on the mainland. Worst of all, freedom of expression has been suppressed and any voices of dissent stifled.

Eva, an accountant clerk, came to reside in the UK all alone because she could not endure the stifling atmosphere in Hong Kong. ‘I felt suffocated in Hong Kong,’ she explains. ‘Every day when I opened the newspapers or turn on the television, I couldn’t help but feel despair.  Sometimes my anger was so intense I wanted to smash the TV screen.’

News of political dissenters being arrested and jailed has never ceased since actions to curb civil liberties began in 2015. In that year, five booksellers disappeared and later found out that they had been ‘arbitrarily detained’. They were ‘ill-treated and forced to confess’ by the CCP’s special forces.

In the past, there were protest marches every year on special days. Millions used to take to Hong Kong’s streets to voice their frustration and anger with government policies, and to shout out their demands for freedoms and democracy. Slogans were always chanted asking the Chief Executives, Leung Chun Ying (2012-2017) and Carrie Lam (2017-2022) to step down. The history of these protests is well documented in Antony Dapiran’s A City of Protest, published in 2017. But when the protests and demands fell on deaf ears, Hong Kong escalated into a City On Fire, as Dapiran chronicled, taking us to the 2019 scenarios when violence surged, and injuries and deaths become more horrifying. 

‘By the end of 2019, over the course of seven months, Hong Kong police had fired over 16,000 rounds of tear gas onto the streets of Hong Kong.’ (Dapiran, City On Fire, 2019)

‘I could smell the tear gas even in my flat three storeys high above the street,’ says Eva, recalling the battles between the protesters and the police. ‘When a protester died after falling off a building, when a young girl died mysteriously and her naked body was found floating in Hong Kong waters, and when another young student protester died during a demonstration, I made up my mind to leave this city.’

Like Eva, many young people in Hong Kong have been pondering the options for leaving this city where civil liberties are diminishing, where control of the citizens is the government’s top priority, and where the separation of powers – legislative, executive and judicial –  is quickly being eroded. 

Hong Kong used to be called the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, a vibrant and lively city in which Chinese and Western cultures merged harmoniously. It was one of the most successful capitalist economies in the world, staying consistently near the top of global economic rankings. Hong Kong people could enjoy freedom of expression, of the press and of publication; freedom of association, assembly, procession and demonstration; and the right and freedom to form and join trade unions, and to strike. Although all these freedoms are still enshrined in the Basic Law of Hong Kong, most of them have gradually become empty words. 

Similarly, Article 35 of the Constitution of People’s Republic of China states that ‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.’ This sounds grand and democratic. But we all know these are just slogans, if not blatant lies, to deceive the people.

Nowadays Hong Kong citizens, who have experienced the erosion of civil liberties in their beloved city, can no longer see the magnificent glow of the ‘Pearl of the Orient’. 

Another vital blow to stifle dissent and silence pro-democracy activists was struck only last year.

On 6 January 2021, 53 Hong Kong activists including former legislators, social workers and academics were arrested by the National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force under the National Security Law. The charges concerned their organisation and participation in the primaries for the subsequently postponed Legislative Council election. This was the largest crackdown under the National Security Law. Its effect was to leave the Legislative Council completely controlled by pro-government legislative councillors.

‘What do you expect of these “hare-brain’d slaves” who have now infested the Legislative Council ?’ says Leo. ‘They all behave after an “undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather, unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion” – and they know nothing but kowtowing to their leaders.’

Leo was until recently a professor at a Hong Kong university, teaching English Literature. In 2018, before the 2022 mass exodus to the UK, he already knew he would no longer be able to call Hong Kong home. Together with his wife, Mary, he came to the UK to pay a visit to a close friend of his and to search for possibilities for emigrating. The couple eventually decided to buy a house here for their retirement. They both hold British passports which they attained by way of the Right of Abode arrangement, an agreement offered to some Hong Kong citizens after its handover to China in 1997.

‘We decided to stay here for good,’ Leo continues. ‘My wife is worried that I might be arrested if I return to Hong Kong.’

‘Almost one hundred percent!’ Mary says with confidence. ‘You will be arrested right at the airport. Look at all those publications of yours! Criticising government policies, condemning the Communist China regime, establishing Non-Governmental Organisations, participating in protests and demonstration marches. They can easily charge you with crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organisations.’

‘Yes, I can’t disagree with you, Mary,’ Leo sighs. ‘Most of my activist friends have been arrested and are now detained awaiting trials.’ He points out that the largest pro-democracy paper, Apple Daily, announced closure on 24 June, 2021 and the chief editor and five other executives were detained. All vociferous pro-democracy NGOs were disbanded. ‘Where else can we publish any criticism or voice our opinions? Who else dares to take to the streets and risk being dumped into the ocean or thrown off buildings?’

Leo and Mary have academic friends who have also migrated to the UK. Some have found jobs and many are trying to settle in, looking for a place to live, getting their children integrated into local schools, and adapting to British culture. In short, starting a new life here. 

Up till now, statistics from the Hong Kong Immigration Department have recorded the daily statistics on Passenger traffic. In the UK, government figures published in March 2022 by the Home Office have revealed that since the introduction of the BNO visa scheme, 113,742 Hongkongers have been granted visas to the UK. The daily reports of Hong Kong citizens leaving for the UK from the Hong Kong International Airport have clearly indicated that a mass exodus is taking place. There must have been and will be many Olivers, Jennys, Evas, Leos and Marys amongst them. Hopefully, many children too will be able to escape the brutal brainwashing education system and enjoy their liberties and schooling here in the UK.  

The Hong Kong diaspora to the UK is most likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Other residents may consider other free countries, with other reasons for emigration. (As to the effect of the Covid lockdowns, their absurdity and disruption to people’s lives, that would require a whole article of its own.) Wherever they plan to go, for many Hongkongers, the exhortation, ‘Let’s leave this town,’ will long be in their thoughts and dreams, awaiting realisation.

The names of some of the people mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their identities.

More on China’s creeping totalitarianism: Jackboots in Manchester 暴政踐踏之下的曼徹斯特, by Simon Cheng

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Some stakeholders in the world of religious education believe that RE is the best subject in the curriculum, offering an exploration of deep existential questions; philosophical and ethical discussions and debates about the meaning of life, purpose and identity; and learning about other’s worldviews in a way that is culturally, morally and socially enriching. Unlike other subjects, which are a dry accumulation of facts and figures mainly driven by economic and employability values, RE offers – so the argument goes – the development of the whole person. RE complements the curriculum perfectly. It is all pink bubbles and balloons everywhere.

Religious Studies GCSE entries have fallen for the third year in the row, but according to NATRE (the National Association of RE Teachers) and the REC (Religious Education Council), this is despite the subject’s popularity among students.

In his book, Reforming RE (2020), Mark Chater describes the ‘enthusiast’ position shared by teachers and educators who believe that everything in RE is great. According to ‘enthusiasts’, the drop in intake is due to neglect by the Department for Education (DfE), low funding, and RE not being included in an ‘Ebacc’ – an accountability performance measure by which schools are monitored. RE, they say, is invaluable for a well-rounded curriculum and relevant to modern life, and we just need more of it and better funding… Why can’t others see it this way?

Ofsted’s 2013 report on RE, ‘Religious education: realising the potential’, concluded that the structures that underpin the local determination of the RE curriculum have failed to keep pace with changes in the wider educational world. The same report stated that the teaching of RE in general is poor and that many pupils leave school with scant subject knowledge.

One survey by Opinium Research asked more than 1,800 adults who had attended UK secondary schools which subject they thought was the least beneficial to their education: RE was among those ranked lowest. Just over one in five (21%) said that RE was the least beneficial, and this was followed by art (chosen by 16%) and PE (10%). Another more recent survey by YouGov from 2022 asked the question, ‘How important do you think it is to teach [various subjects] at secondary school?’ It found that 55% people in UK believe that RE is either not very important or not important at all, ranking it 15th out of 18 subjects in terms of importance. Even more tellingly, the same polling company asked school students in 2018, ‘Which subject do you enjoy the most?‘ On a scale of ‘I enjoy it a lot’, RE was second to last, with only Citizenship being behind. When it comes to the percentages of participants who chose ‘I don’t enjoy it very much’ or ‘I don’t enjoy it at all’, RE was by far the least popular, with 44% pupils disliking the subject.

Yet the number of students entering on GCSE RE full courses increased from 170,303 entries in 2009 to 284,057 in 2016. This was used by enthusiasts as evidence that the subject is popular among students – despite consistent feedback about its confusing purpose, the low quality of the teaching, and its low popularity among both students and parents. However, any weight placed on the increase in the number of students taking the subject ignores the fact that RE is compulsory across all key stages. The increase in the number of entries was always driven by its compulsory status rather than its popularity. The recent decreases which are taking place in spite of its being compulsory only serve to show how troublesome a state RE is in.

The latest Ofsted review of RE, published in May 2021, has provided the first academic literature review of RE and pointed out numerous flaws in subject pedagogy as well as in the general teaching of the subject. Among many technical points that are more relevant to teachers, I will focus on the parts that I think are the most important in demonstrating why the subject is inherently flawed, why students dislike it, and why its educational outcomes are not beneficial for our modern liberal democracy. 

Firstly, the problem of the knowledge being taught. The report states that there is no clarity as to what constitutes reliable knowledge in teaching religions and non-religious worldviews, and a lack of clarity as to what constitutes objective, critical and pluralistic scholarship in RE. This is because the subject is not grounded in the academic study of religions, and is consequently the only subject without a national curriculum. Rather, the ‘knowledge’ taught in RE in schools is determined by religious groups themselves, in every borough, through religious representation on the SACREs. The latter are the standing advisory councils on religious education which usually determine the syllabus for maintained schools in their area, and which act as political interest groups offering their ideological products.

Religious groups are less interested in the academic study of religions than in the pastoral aspect of their religion, religious apologetics, and in presenting their religions in the most beneficial light. They are happy to use taxpayers’ money to do a soft form of proselytising by influencing schools’ RE syllabus.

The status quo, and the power structures that determine the RE curriculum to the benefit of religious groups, are sometimes defended with an argument that the current RE settlement of local syllabus-making promotes democracy, inclusivity and diversity. But this is a fallacious and self-serving argument. The current arrangements are only beneficial to the dominant religious groups’ interest. They are not in the interest of the public, nor of religious and non-religious minorities, nor of dissenting ‘heretical’ and progressive voices, nor of our students, who are being denied an unbiased education.

Similarly, in the opening decades of the 21st century in the USA, we have seen Christian groups passing ‘academic freedom’ bills and using their privileges and influence to undermine the teaching of evolution in science lessons – all in the name of inclusivity and pluralism. They love democracy and freedom when it benefits them, but less so when their privileges are challenged.

As a consequence of the local arrangements of syllabus-making, in which the representatives of religious groups decide what should be taught, the content of RE becomes distorted. This is because the purpose and vision of the subject, as interpreted by religious representatives, is to implicitly assert a benevolent view of religious traditions and beliefs. This is usually done indirectly, through the omission of the negative parts of a religion. Explicit instruction into positive beliefs is never as effective as indoctrination through the omission of problematic ones. The subject tends to be taught as a form of indoctrination through a partial and incomplete presentation of a particular religion’s tenets. Students are left with a false sense of having complete knowledge and an educated understanding about the religion, when in fact they do not.

This outcome has been emphasised in the Ofsted review: it concludes that ‘bad RE’ is spreading ‘unhelpful misconceptions’ by presenting religions only in a positive light, and claiming that ‘only good and loving religion is true religion and bad religion is false religion’.

As teachers of RE, we seem to be masters of spreading the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. Take any of the abusive theology found in religions or any abusive beliefs or practices throughout history or today that are inspired by religions. These are usually omitted in RE lessons, but sometimes crop up. As an RE teacher, one just needs to select one of the plethora of rhetorical devices deployed in religious apologetics to dismiss any such negative aspect out of hand. For instance, one can tell students that they are taking it out of context; that people who do unpleasant things in the name of religion are not true believers but are just extremists and not true to their religion; that it is culture rather than religion; that it is politics hijacking religion – and so on and so forth. The blame is always laid on something else, while the attitude is maintained that nothing negative could truly be part of the religion.

RE as taught in England and Wales today is a subject where religions are deliberately sanitised and misrepresented in the name of promoting respect, tolerance and community cohesion. Respect and tolerance are legitimate ideals that we should still hold on to, but unfortunately, we extend these to respecting beliefs and religions, rather than promoting respect for individual people and their rights.

It is vital to promote respect and tolerance for individual human rights and people, not for individual beliefs, including religions. In doing so, we must be able to deal with the abusive elements of religions that do not respect human rights.

The 2021 Ofsted review made several recommendations that could enable RE to become a pluralistic, objective and critical subject, and not spread unhelpful misconceptions. Above all, it recommended that RE should be grounded in the academic study of religion and non-religious worldviews, using the well-established methods, processes and other tools of scholarship that are already used by scholars to make sense of global and historical religions and non-religious worldviews. However, the DfE seems unwilling to make reforms. A recent chance to make progress would have been following the REC Commission on RE final report in 2018, which recommended changing the subject to ‘Religion and Worldviews’. But the DfE rejected this recommendation on the basis that it would add too much to teachers’ workloads.

With the DfE unwilling to make reforms, RE remains cluttered with many pedagogies and different visions about the aim and purpose of the subject. Enthusiasts believe that having a subject that touches upon philosophy, ethics, theology and many other disciplines is its strength. Yet in reality, this mixture of approaches only obfuscates the subject further. It would be far more beneficial for our pupils to study only ethics or philosophy, with their clear aims and purposes, as well-established disciplines in their own right, than to keep on with this artefact of the past called RE, burdened as it is with external ideological demands that acts as a proxy for religious apologetics and soft proselytism. We do not have ethics or philosophy in our schools because RE has hijacked them and is doing their work badly. 

RE’s distorted pedagogy, lack of objective knowledge and unclear educational outcomes produce confusing assessment criteria. In KS4 (when they are aged 14-16), students face exam questions like ‘Why is prayer important for Christians?’ or ‘How does a belief in resurrection influence Christians today?’ A typical mark scheme will contain a list of benevolent generic answers: ‘It makes them do good deeds in order to go to heaven’, or ‘Prayer gets them closer to God’. It is not hard to see why students dislike the subject, especially as according to the latest research on religiosity, almost 60% of citizens in the UK are not affiliated to a particular religion. The proportion is even higher among the young. Outside school, it would seem, religion in the UK is losing relevance generation by generation.

In the limited time allocated to a subject on the curriculum, is RE as it is currently taught really what we want our students to learn about? Is it going to help them grasp the messy complexity of religion and non-religious beliefs and their global, historical and contemporary place in the world? The educational outcomes of RE are designed to create a ‘religionist’: a soft religion apologist who will not be able to think of the place of religion in the world in a critical manner, but will be well-equipped to explain away any criticism of religion. They will become bad thinkers, and fail to see both the good and the bad in religions. They are wired to believe that the RE teacher in Batley Grammar school should have never shown the cartoon of Mohammed in class, because it is ‘disrespectful’, whilst in another breath stating that violence and hatred have nothing to do with religions.

Extreme beliefs and behaviour can only flourish when they are protected with a buffer zone of ‘enablers’, a majority of well-wishers who view their tradition uncritically and are happy to endlessly explain away any abusive theology.

It might be hoped that the fallacy that ‘only good religion is true religion’, identified by the 2021 Ofsted review, will trigger a change in the way the RE syllabus is put together, and the way it is taught. But I am not so optimistic. It seems to me that there will be no change until the power structures behind RE, and the influence of privileged religious groups over it, are removed.

This does not mean that religious groups should not be stakeholders, influencers and partners when it comes to working on the RE syllabus. Rather, it means that their privileged position should be removed, so that we can have a secular RE for the 21st century. Such a subject should be grounded in academic study; should be objective, critical and pluralistic; and should be inclusive of both religious and non-religious views. It should offer powerful knowledge of the best that has been said in religious studies scholarship, not theology. It should have clarity in its aims, which will be to promote academic scholarship about religions, as well as the British fundamental values of liberal democracy, equality and individual liberty. By doing so, it should implicitly promote respect for human rights. This should in turn aid and support progressive views in religious traditions, because students will be more educated and more able to identify and discern what the real scholarship is and what is just religious apologetics.

But support for these progressive views can only happen if we are able to identify which ones are regressive and which ones are progressive. We cannot do this by lumping together all religions and religiosity in one basket. Change will not come until privilege-blind stakeholders change themselves – which is highly unlikely – or until their privileges are taken away from them. This will only happen when this country truly becomes a secular country and a state for all of its citizens, no matter what religion or belief they hold. We can start by taking into account the important insights from the 2021 Ofsted review, and work on building a national curriculum for RE that is grounded in the academic study of religions.

When the DfE, in 2018, rejected the recommendations to start working on a new subject called ‘Religion and Worldviews’, I felt disappointed. Now, after considering what kind of changes the RE stakeholders do propose, it has become clear that much of what they propose is merely cosmetics without any substantial change in the pedagogy. Religious groups are as keen as ever for RE to be their platform for apologetics.

As long Britain has an official state religion, and as long as dominant religious groups are privileged, real reform of RE will simply not be achieved. Perhaps we should replace the subject with wider civic and moral education, which would include the basics of religious education, but not be the basis of the subject. Such a subject would enable our students to learn more objectively about human rights like freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and concepts like religious discrimination and religious privilege. It would enable them to discuss the place of religions in the world in a more informed and critical manner.

Civic and moral studies was introduced in France during its 2015 school reforms. In a light of the DfE’s inability to substantially reform RE in a critical, objective and inclusive way in England and Wales, a vision for a similar subject, which would replace RE, is slowly being formed, among others by the National Secular Society’s Secular Education Forum, of which I am a member. I and others have also been helping the NSS to develop resources for schools that touch upon issues of secularism, human rights, equality and freedoms, religious privileges and discrimination. These themes should be well suited to civic and moral studies; to me, at least, they seem far more educationally meaningful than the proselytising of RE. Ultimately, replacing religious education with wider civic and moral studies would probably be the best course for future students and our society as a whole.

The post Bad Religious Education appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘I’m offended by that….’ was the startled response I got from a fellow teacher. I’d raised concern in a department meeting. A student had been coming to school with her face concealed behind a niqab. I said that children shouldn’t have their faces covered in school.

Eyebrows were raised. Lips were pursed.

‘So…. Anyway…’

The ‘discussion’ was over.

I couldn’t help a final retort… ‘Be offended, then. It will do you some good.’

Admittedly conceited – and childish – I was sincere. I wanted my colleague, with whom I normally had an excellent relationship, to ‘feel’ the sharp jab of offence and consider, really, what had spurned it. After all, pain is so often a precursor to change, or at least to reflection – I hoped.

It was October, and for a month, a new, 16-year-old Year 12 student of Bengali heritage had been coming to our east London school wearing niqab – an Islamic face covering. She was a new student. Nobody had ever seen her face. She just arrived wearing it. Nobody said anything. We prided ourselves at this school, a recently established free school in east London, on our reflective, progressive ethos. Yet as far as this student’s approach was concerned, any sense of reflection or progress was hard to find.

I raised my concerns. On a practical, safeguarding level alone, it was a worry. How could the school know the student was who they claimed to be? Sixth formers have branded uniforms and carry photo identity cards for a reason. Then, of course, there’s the ethical quagmire around the whole ‘covering of women’ issue.

‘Just get over it. It’s their culture,’ I was told by a colleague.

‘Whose culture, exactly? Niqabs are a Gulf tradition and about as Bengali as the didgeridoo. And we don’t have a problem policing “culture” when it comes to the fashion choices of other minorities’ – is what I would have responded, had the conversation been allowed.

Meanwhile, other students were starting to follow suit. A handful of girls – all of Bengali heritage – were now coming in to school in niqab. For some reason, it seemed to be fine for them to do so intermittently: some days a student in my Year 12 English Literature class would wear a niqab, other days she wouldn’t. On the days when she did, her height and voice were the only ways I could identify her. She was quiet and of average size, so I couldn’t be certain who she was on the days that she did come in covered. My go-to approach was by process of elimination via the class register, which didn’t seem satisfactory or safe.

Then the Muslim boys, in disobedience of the school dress code, started to come in to school in thobe – long gowns traditionally worn by Muslim men. The school’s management team buried their heads deeper in the sand. Apparently, Muslim students could bend the rules, while others would get detentions for wearing trainers or donning ‘sculpted’ haircuts.

Any time I brought up this Islamic exceptionalism, papers were shuffled, eyes were averted and excuses made. Being of part-Bengali heritage myself gave me a certain latitude to be franker than others, but the mostly white, middle class staff room – normally a cacophony of ‘decolonising the curriculum’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘women’s rights’ – was silent on this issue, even though it blatently involved privileging one group of students over the rest.

And we all know why.

For the same reason I have to write this article under a pseudonym. The same reason a Yorkshire teacher and his family are still in hiding after showing the wrong cartoons to his class. It is ‘Islamophobia’ in the literal sense: teachers and schools are scared of Islam. Batley Grammar, protests at the gates, online furore, death threats, Samuel Paty, being labelled by colleagues as ‘intolerant’, ‘racist’, ‘offensive’. Schools are terrified of doing the wrong thing – so we do nothing.

And the worst symptom of this fear? Silence. In order to counter the unresponsiveness of my colleagues, I contacted my Head and other senior management via email to outline my concerns. There was no reply. Eventually, when I encountered my Head in the staff room, he nervously agreed that the school needed to ‘have a conversation’ about these issues.

That was four years ago. Since then, the cultural stand-off has only become more entrenched. The Muslim students effectively wear what they want, leave lessons to pray when they want, separate themselves according to gender when they want. They excuse themselves – on cultural grounds – from assemblies celebrating ‘controversial’ topics such as Pride month. Classrooms are commandeered in break times as ‘safe spaces’ and ‘prayer rooms’, segregated by gender, ethnicity and religion.

The staff pat themselves on the back for their ‘tolerance’ while simultaneously wringing their hands when the same students express intolerance on issues such as women’s rights, homosexuality, censorship and evolution – which they often dismiss as being inappropriate, ‘Western colonial’ content. But still nobody wants to have a conversation about it. Or even to ask what kind of message we as a school send when one group of students is allowed to create its own dress codes, curate its own curriculum, crowbar its ideas on gender and sexuality into classrooms.

While there may be some merit to certain cultural accommodations, the fear and silence that surround the whole situation are the most worrying aspect of all. Teachers today cannot even talk about the repercussions of allowing one particular group to break the rules applicable to everyone else, for fear of causing ‘offence’. What hope do future generations have?

The post Silence of the teachers appeared first on The Freethinker.