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.

Review

Books

Community

Culture

15 November 2023

4 min read

Giving voice to those on the edge

A nervy, precarious read echoes the lives of outsiders across Europe. Simon Burton-Jones reviews Ben Judah’s This is Europe.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A grandmother is embraced by two grandchildren.

Nino, from Georgia, embraces her grandchildren after their mother's death.

Ben Judah.

In The Dream of Europe, Dutch historian Geert Mak takes on the continent’s twenty-first century story.

There’s something contradictory, he says, about writing the history of an era when you’re right in the middle of it, of a world in which you’re fully involved.

His attempt to do this is built round three great socio-economic tremors: the global financial crash of 2008, the ensuing Greek debt crisis of 2009 and following years and the migrant emergency of 2015. It is a long, involved work.

Ben Judah has tried something very different in This is Europe (Picador, 2023). Adopting the style of his award-winning This is London, he tells the continent’s story via twenty-three disparate individuals. From Turks to Spaniards, Georgians to Swedes and Poles to Serbs, if there is one thing shared most in common, it’s the sense of outsiders trying to make their way from the edge of life to a place of security, even belonging.

History is having its makeover in the attention given to ordinary, prosaic, unseen lives that are lived in the shadow of bigger themes. Judah is not alone and not the first to deliver this, but it is a welcome departure from the grand sweeping narratives and ideologies by which the story of Europe has customarily been told.

He begins with a Dutch harbour pilot, Jelle, who boards and guides container ships into port. It is Europe’s consumer gateway. Jelle observes: ‘What rubbish is actually in these containers?’ It’s toys. TVs. Chairs. Tables. Bicycles. Shampoo. Only rubbish.

But the commentary on Europe’s excesses ends there and there is no logical progression in the book from seaport to city centre. Judah instead jumps from one location to another and tells each individual story in a staccato delivery that lends a sense of immediacy and urgency to their lives. It makes for a nervy, precarious read.

There is the resentful Romanian lorry driver whose account lifts the lid on the sordid risks long-distance jobs supply. The Latvian teenage girl who slips into online sex work, satisfying the fantasies of older men across the world but paying for her education along the way. The thoughtful Belarussian family that defies President Lukashenko and pays a heavy price. A young Turkish woman whose romance with an Austrian boy seems doomed to failure until the final moments. The Russian gas worker whose stint in the Arctic circle has a hint of the Gulag about it. A sex-obsessed Syrian refugee who makes it in the world of porn.

This latter case of the Arab porn star is indicative of Ben Judah’s journalistic style. The seemingly soulless promiscuity and infidelity carries no authorial judgment. Ibrahim escapes the war-ravaged Middle East, is subject to racist humiliation, has sex with anyone who is up for it and is about to be made homeless when he finds a way into an online Arab market in porn. It is part American dream and part pulp fiction set against the backdrop of conservative family Budapest. We are left wondering what to make of it, which is probably Judah’s intention.

Geert Mak speaks of Europe as a great project by free citizens who tried to take the course of history into their own hands instead of merely submitting to it; projects with their origins in the Enlightenment ideals of human rights, liberty, equality and fraternity.

Mak’s dreamy aspiration has just enough about it to attract outsiders but its values when probed are as malleable as playdoh. When pressure is applied, is it possible to say that Europe has cohesive and durable moral values, ones derived from its history? The liberal individualism drawn from the left, where identity has become more distinctive than class, is suspicious of religion that creates hard boundaries, and of objective moral values that constrain behaviour. The right, whose neo-liberal market forces have corroded the very family structures it claims to support, is wary of religion that champions diverse communities. The impact of the left and of the right in these ways is felt in the personal stories of Judah’s book. As unseen forces draw people to poles like filings to magnets, is there a way of transforming these emphases?

There is a relational view of life, perhaps buried deeply in the European Christian Democratic tradition, that values the person in community and the quality of our relationships at every level over ever-expanding GDP, that sacred cow of post-war politics. Where unity and diversity can be held in a creative partnership as we respond to the call to love others as we love ourselves. But it needs clear policy edges that rescue it from pious bromide.

In This is Europe we meet people who are deeply human and equally scarred, often by other people and the forces over which no-one seems to have control, who find their hope and meaning in the relationships they form and through which they make community. Further to the east, Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich has spent a lifetime teasing out ordinary stories of the Soviet Union, from the veterans of Afghanistan to the victims of Chernobyl via the trauma of the nineties. Hers is a more discursive tale than Judah’s but carries the same sense of disorientation, loss and stoic hope.

Europe cannot be summed up, but Judah, in turning to its edges and listening patiently and empathetically to those who only want to make their way against the odds, inhabits the ethic of scripture in giving a voice to the voiceless. If its stripped back, breathless style carries echoes of Mark’s Gospel, the attention he gives to those in existential pain is St John’s. He calls them each by name. The moral question facing Europe is whether we really want to know their stories.