Imposing Secularism in State Schools Isn’t Religious Neutrality, but Religious Persecution

Civitas, 10 November 2009

‘Now there’s spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down. Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.’ So sang Bob Dylan.

I was put in mind of those lyrics by a recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

The Court found in favour of an atheistic Finnish-born immigrant to Italy who had complained that crucifixes displayed in classrooms of state schools there had violated her human right to educate her children in line with her convictions (Article 2 of Protocol 1), and the human rights of her children to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 9).

The Court agreed. It ruled that ‘the State… was required to observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education, where attending classes was compulsory irrespective of religion, and where the aim should be to foster critical thinking in pupils.’

This judgement has European-wide implications. If upheld on appeal, it could lead to the mandatory secularisation of publicly-funded schools throughout the European Union.

What seems not to have dawned on the judges who found in favour of the complainant was that the removal of all religious symbolism, ritual and teaching from classrooms is no more neutral a stance towards religion than is the adoption of some confessional stance.

Respecting the rights of conscience and of parents in a religiously and culturally pluralistic Europe is not best served by the mandatory secularisation of all its public spaces. It is best served by providing genuine choices to minorities, while upholding and preserving national traditions that necessarily reflect the outlook and predilections of the majority. In the case of Italy, those predilections are for Roman Catholicism.

One has to wonder if there is not a secularist hidden agenda behind a lot of the anti-religious rulings which are increasingly being handed down by European elites. On this matter, I am put in mind by a remark of the French philosopher Simone Weil in her marvellous 1949 book, The Need for Roots. She observed there that:

‘Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies… [can be] exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.  For people who are really uprooted there remain only two possible sorts of behaviour: either to fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death, like the majority of the slaves in the days of the Roman Empire, or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot… those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so.’ (p.45)

How apt a description is that paragraph of Europe as it now is, as it rushes to commit cultural suicide and expunge all reference to its cultural roots.