Village Green separating Church and State
By Kent Barker
It’s the idyllic pastoral scene. Cricket
on our village green with St George’s standing sentinel at the southern end.
It’s the church—both as a building and as an institution—that has been at the centre
of village life for much of the past millennium. Historians may argue as to
whether it’s been an important ingredient in social cohesion or a force for
maintaining divisive social strata but you can’t argue about its influence. Even
today, an extraordinarily high proportion of the ‘great and the good’ of the
village are churchgoers and the rector is involved with a surprisingly
extensive number of local institutions and activities.
But this influence on village life
seems increasingly out of proportion to those who actually have anything to do
with the church. To start with only 16% of the population define themselves as
belonging to the Church of England and, of them, half never attend a church
service. Indeed, only 10.7% of people who
identify with the Church of England say they attend church at least weekly, (2014 British Social Attitudes Survey). Obviously,
in a Home Counties rural village, the proportions will be higher but probably
not massively so, and I rather doubt if the weekly attendance at St George’s is
much to write home about.
To digress slightly: I turned on the
radio the other afternoon to hear Eddie Mair of the PM programme announcing
that, to non-believers, the next item was likely to be pretty much
incomprehensible since it concerned a debate as to whether God should be known
as a ‘She’ rather than a ‘He’.
Apparently a group within the Church of England is calling for the
female appellation following the selection of the first women bishops. Now this
may seem to some about as important as the age-old theological conundrum: how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin? (The answer is: (a) none as angels
don’t exist or (b) an infinite number as angels aren’t corporal beings so don’t
take up any space.)
But it was the way that Mr Mair
phrased his introduction that struck me.
Here, for the first time I can remember, was a presenter acknowledging
that a large proportion of the population just simply don’t ‘do’ religion and
that Richard Dawkins’ contention that accepting the existence of God is
comparable to believing there are ‘fairies
at the bottom of the garden’ has more than a little resonance.
Now the point of all this is that,
in an age of non-belief, it seems utterly absurd that the Government have
effectively excluded the possibility of studying humanism at GSCE or A level.
The Department for Education says it worked with all the major faith groups to
develop a new "more academically rigorous". religious studies
qualification which would give students “better knowledge and understanding of
the diversity of beliefs in modern Britain”.
But that diversity clearly does not
include the ‘belief’ that there is no God. It’s a stance that even senior
Anglicans are uneasy about. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,
along with 28 other religious leaders, wrote to the Schools’ Minister urging
him to revisit the decision. So far there’s been no suggestion the Government
are inclined to do so.
The same illogical thinking appears
to apply to the BBC’s Thought for the Day.
They define this as a ‘religious’ slot and appear to argue that humanism cannot,
by definition, be considered a religion. I think this nonsensical. What is
religion other than a belief mechanism? And an atheist or humanist believes just
as firmly that there is no superhuman controlling power, as a Christian or
Muslim may believe there is one.
And, while we are at it, shouldn’t
we be questioning whether, as a nation, we should have an established church? Given
that 50.6% of the population describes itself as belonging to no religion and, of
the half that do, only a small proportion ever attends a place of worship, why
on earth is secularism not enshrined in law or constitution as it is in the US?
In fact twice as many nations currently embrace secularism as have an
established state religion. We remain seriously out of kilter with world
opinion.
Which brings me back to the village
green. Halfway up on the right hand side is our popular and desperately overcrowded
primary school. Or, I should say, our Church
of England primary school. I’ve fought long and hard for new premises and
it appears that we may, indeed, be about to get them. But it will still be tied
to the ‘established’ church. In 2011, about a
third of all 20,000 state-funded schools in England were faith schools. Wouldn’t it be better if ALL schools were truly independent
of any particular religion, and that children were left to make up their own
mind on the ‘faries’ question?
Read more at: KentCountryMatters.Blogspot.Com
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