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Education

25 January 2024

4 min read

There’s a blindingly obvious way to teach religious tolerance

George Pitcher disagrees with the media’s approval of a school ban on religious observance.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

school pupils sit at desk, some with a hand raised.

Michaela School pupils in class.

The decision by “Britain’s strictest school”, the Michaela Community School in north-west London, to ban religious observance after a Muslim majority among the children started prayer rituals, which led to some bullying and violence (and indeed a lawsuit), has met with almost universal media approval across the political spectrum.

Nick Timothy, a columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a former spin-doctor for Theresa May as prime minister, predictably used it as a dread warning against an Islamic threat under the headline: “Multiculturism is becoming a Trojan horse for Islamist domination.”

In what some might term as the sensible middle-ground of the Sunday Times, Camilla Long weighed in with an attack on Muslim cultural observance and then posed the extraordinarily illiberal question: “Wouldn’t it be better if we banished faith in schools altogether?” On the left, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian agreed, concluding that it’s “time to abolish religious schools.”

This seems to be the kind of old-school management that said that if you can’t play together nicely, there will be no playtime for anyone.

There’s something cultic about the free school Michaela and its headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh. The right-wing love it for its Gradgrind strict disciplines and consequently high academic results. The left are said to hate it for much the same reasons. And almost universally Ms Birbalsingh is treated as an educational demi-god.

Allow me to demur. The first thing I want to say is something I think is blindingly obvious: You don’t teach children religious tolerance by being religiously intolerant. I don’t usually like to have to coin a truism, but there we are.

The desire to ban is an unfortunate tendency in Birbalsingh. I understand why she might want to ban knives or drugs or porn in her school, as would all schools, but religious observance? This seems to be the kind of old-school management that said that if you can’t play together nicely, there will be no playtime for anyone.

Transposed into the religious context, that becomes: “If you can’t pray together nicely, there will be no prayers.” This grows into an extreme form of secularism, which pretends that there is no religion in the world, when we know that in fact it’s full of religious people. That doesn’t seem to be a good education for our young, if good education is meant to prepare them for the world, which I posit that it does.

I’m with our late Queen Elizabeth on this and, in particular, the profound generosity of her Christian faith.

The next thing I want to say is that it’s incumbent on a decent school to teach that the three Abramic faiths – in order of their emergence, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are in their authentic forms religions of peace.

Anyone who claims that Islam’s holy book, the Koran, is intrinsically violent clearly hasn’t read the the Bible or the Torah. But, in all three instances, human violence and oppression are met with the redemption of an all-loving God.

It follows that the Michaela can and should ban bullying and intimidation, but not the authentic cultural practices of these religions. It might, naturally, simply be easier to ban the lot and be done with it, but nobody has said that running a school is meant to be easy.

In my own experience as a parish priest, visiting a Church of England primary school (the sort that Toynbee, as a good liberal, would ban) for assemblies, is that tolerance and diversity are best taught naturally by practice.

At prayer time, I was gently reminded by the headteacher that I shouldn’t invite the children to pray with words such as “hands together” as that’s not how all families pray (if they pray at all). Better to say: “Let’s get ready to pray, however we do that.” Tolerance in action.

Finally, off the back of talking about a Christian school in a nominally Christian state, I’d like to conclude with how a Christian school (clearly not Birbalsingh’s) should behave. Clearly, evangelising in a multicultural institution is inappropriate. What we should aspire to is pluralism.

I’m with our late Queen Elizabeth on this and, in particular, the profound generosity of her Christian faith. She delivered a speech at Lambeth Palace to mark her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. She started by saying: “The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

She went on to say: “Gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely.” It seems to me that this should be an aspiration that is taught in our schools. Not just the Christian ones, but all of them.

It invites children of other faiths and of no faith to respond accordingly. It seems to be at the heart of an education that teaches how the world actually is, rather than how we fantasise it to be.

And it provides a considerably more valuable lesson for children than the instinct of Ms Birbalsingh and her media cheerleaders to ban things.

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Film & TV

18 May 2024

5 min read

Théoden and breaking the spell

Bernard Hill’s most famous role sheds light on where humanity needs to be.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A movie scene of a king and prince walking confidently.

Bernard Hill, middle, in The Lord of the Rings.

New Line Cinema.

Recently we saw the sad passing of Bernard Hill, one of the great British actors of his generation, whose career enjoyed many high points. Hill came to prominence, in Britain at least, in the 1980s with his role as an unemployed tarmac-layer in the BBC series Boys From the Blackstuff. Through the 1990s, he went on to star in a number of big budget Hollywood feature films, such as The Ghost and The Darkness, Titanic, and The Scorpion King. But his best-known role, the one which won him global recognition, was as King Théoden in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In both Tolkien’s book and Jackson’s adaptation, the character of King Théoden plays a pivotal role in making a stand against the forces of evil advancing under the banners of first the wizard Saruman the White in The Two Towers, and then the Dark Lord Sauron himself in The Return of the King, the trilogy’s climax.

Théoden’s character arc is as heroic as any in Tolkien’s epic. But perhaps the most memorable moment within it comes when he is first introduced. Gandalf comes to Théoden’s hall of Edoras to rally support against Saruman’s rampaging armies of orcs. But instead of a redoubtable king and ally in the fight against their common enemy, he finds a weak man buckled under the weight of old age and infirmity, cowed by fear and indecision, and enthralled to the counsel of Grima Wormtongue - whom Gandalf reveals to be an agent of Saruman.

In Jackson’s version, Gandalf ‘delivers’ Théoden from his enthrallment, in effect breaking the spell of inertia and inaction which Saruman, through his minion Wormtongue, has cast over him. Théoden awakes from his bondage, is physically rejuvenated, and is now able to rise and take his proper place in the battleline against Sauron’s evil power. In Tolkien’s version, Théoden has more agency. He chooses, at last, to throw off the counsel of Wormtongue and cling to the slim thread of hope which Gandalf represents, however desperate it may seem.

It is a powerful image, and one from which we can and must learn today.

Our ears are open to so many voices through both mainstream and social media that it becomes a matter of extreme importance to be able to discern who is Gandalf and who is Grima Wormtongue?

Few would deny that recent times have revealed new and determined manifestations of evil in our culture and our world. And yet, both inside and outside the church, these latter years have also been characterised by a feeling of helplessness and inaction in the face of such evil. It’s common to hear both men and women complain that they feel unable to speak up in opposition to what they perceive as wrong. They have been silenced. Either those who dare to speak up find themselves cancelled. Or else those who don't self-censor, keeping their mouths shut and their heads well below the parapet. Like Théoden, they lock themselves away in their hall. In this latter case, the battle is ceded without ever having drawn a sword.

As the famous Edmund Burke quote goes: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Much of the church, some might dare to say most of it, resides in this place of cowed inaction. Enthralled and confused by the Wormtongue whisperings of the media as mouthpieces for agendas diametrically opposed to the good, we have willingly subjected ourselves to this spell. And the consequence? Like the Westfold of Rohan, the land is burning.

It is not controversial to say anyone who cares about our culture and its future needs to awaken from their slumber. Needs to cast off - or else have cast out - the gag of silence. But what is more troubling perhaps is that, even having done that, we cannot agree on what is evil and what is good.

In the Bible, the devil is portrayed as often masquerading as an angel of light. And it warns against the descent of some cultures into a state of such moral confusion that God’s ordinances are inverted: good is called evil, and evil is called good.

So how are we to navigate our way through this mire of uncertainty? Warnings against misinformation and disinformation abound. And yet, those in positions of power who proclaim them may equally be charged with propagating untruths and dissembling realities, all for the sake of shoring up their own power structures.

All this is to say - our ears are open to so many voices through both mainstream and social media that it becomes a matter of extreme importance to be able to discern who is Gandalf and who is Grima Wormtongue?

Tolkien’s choice of the name Grima Wormtongue is significant. ‘Grima’ derives from the Old Norse word, grímr which means ‘mask’. ‘Worm’ similarly derives from another Old Norse word: ormr which means ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’.

As such, it throws us right back into the Garden of Eden and the honeyed words of the serpent which led humanity into such disaster, offering some purported good up front, while concealing the calamity (and shame) which comes hard on its heels. If we are to stand up and contest the modern manifestations of evil, we must be able to recognise the side of the field of battle on which to take our stand.

Who is Gandalf? In Tolkien’s world, though he hated the idea of his work being interpreted as allegory, Gandalf does represent the Christ figure. And Sauron in turn suggests the Anti-Christ - a nebulous figure arising from scripture, poorly understood at the best of times. But somehow the fountainhead from which, humanity is told, all evil must flow.

But if humanity thinks of Christ on the side of good, and Christ as the most human of us all, perhaps this provides a yardstick by which we can discern the lines of battle.

Is it human or anti-human to stand up for life at its most vulnerable? Is it human or anti-human to stand up for the family unit? Is it human or anti-human to honour and celebrate each and every Imago Dei as they were created to be? Is it human or anti-human to safeguard a parent’s right to speak good into their children’s life? Is it human or anti-human to preserve the innocence of our young? Is it human or anti-human to challenge systems of power which enable all kinds of exploitation and other self-evident evils?

First we must awaken. Then we must choose our side. And finally, like Théoden, we must ride to the fight.

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