What’s Next?

A head-teacher trying to remove the religious requirements placed on all schools has been told that it’s ‘politically impossible’. The UK has this archaic law that schools must take part in a daily act of worship of a ‘mostly Christian’ nature and when they don’t, they lose points with the Ofsted inspectors.

Is God really impressed with compulsory worship? I’m of the opinion it does a disservice to everyone. Prayer is quite literally something sacred for believers and to go through the motions of something believers find of huge importance seems to me to do a huge disservice to them. I don’t believe God exists, I don’t believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, I deny the existence of miracles - Surely it makes every believer’s prayers hollower when I said ‘amen’?

A spokesman for the Church of England said: ‘If he is arguing for a way for individual schools to opt out of those bits of the act he does not like that is not something we would support. Either overtly or by default, this country is still a Christian one.’

We don’t want to opt out of the act; we want to CHANGE the act. These are schools with no religious charter being forced to worship when there’s no guarantee the schools or parents (let alone the pupils) agree with it, and why? Because this is a ‘Christian’ country. But who’s Christianity? Certainly not the CoE’s anymore, the Catholic Church surpassed them a little while ago. Every single religious group out there is a minority, and whilst Christians together make up 56%, that’s not a case for a ‘Christian’ country. ‘As a group we loosely share a similar set of beliefs, therefore our slim majority gives us the right to set the agenda’, really?

Dr Kelley says it quite well ‘I feel that children have a right to not having a particular point of view, they should not be promoted to a political party, nor should they to a religion. The daily act of worship is, I think, inappropriate at school.’ The political party analogue I’ve always felt is quite apt, there is a difference between learning about the Labour Party and singing ‘The Red Flag’ in assemblies. If the party in government created a law saying schools must venerate its ideals, there’d be outrage but if the established religion does the same, almost no-one seems notice.

For freedom of conscience to be preserved for all our official religion must be no religion. A secular state discriminates against no religious or not-religious group. The more political the church becomes, the better it makes the case for its disestablishment.