Atheists and Anglicans could unite against intolerance

My Times column is on religion in schools:

We now know from Peter Clarke’s report, published today but
leaked last week, that there was indeed “co-ordinated, deliberate
and sustained action to introduce an intolerant and aggressive
Islamist ethos into some schools” in Birmingham.

Whistleblowers first approached the British Humanist Association
in January with such allegations, weeks before the appearance of
the Trojan Horse letter. The BHA (of which I should declare I am a
“distinguished supporter” though I’ve never done much to deserve
this accolade) properly passed on the information to the Department
for Education.

Pavan Dhaliwal, of the BHA, has made the awkward point that much
of what went on in the Park View Trust schools would have been
permissible if the schools had been designated “faith schools”. The
BHA campaigns against the very existence of state-funded faith
schools, pointing out that Britain is one of only four countries in
the world to allow religious selection in admissions to
state-funded schools. The others are Estonia, Ireland and
Israel.

In short, we can hardly be shocked to find religious
indoctrination going on in some schools if we encourage segregation
on the basis of faith. Since 2000 the proportion of secondary
schools that are legally religious has increased by 20 per cent,
and their freedom of action has greatly increased. The best way to
prevent young girls in Birmingham being told that “if a woman said
no to sex with her husband then angels would punish her from dusk
till dawn”, as happened in Birmingham, is to leave religious
practice — though not education about religion — out of school
altogether.

I know such a view is considered intolerant, even bigoted — a
charge frequently levelled at non-believers. “The trouble with that
Richard Dawkins”, a lay preacher said to me some years ago, “is
that he’s welcome to his views, but I don’t like him forcing them
on others.” Passing up the temptation to point out his own
hypocrisy as a preacher, I gently reminded him that, whereas I had
to go to prayers or chapel every day at my school, nobody has ever
been forced to read Richard Dawkins on atheism.

August sees a
great global gathering of atheists and humanists in Oxford for
the World Humanist Congress, the first time this body has met in
Britain since 1978. Professor Dawkins will be on the stage, along
with a galaxy of infidel stars, including the Nobel prizewinner
Wole Soyinka, Philip Pullman, Jim al-Khalili, Nick Clegg and the
Bangladeshi blogger Asif Mohiddun, who was attacked and stabbed in
the back, shoulder and chest by a group of radical religious
fundamentalists because of his criticism of Islam.

Not there in person will be Mubarak Bala, the Nigerian detained on a
psychiatric ward for being an atheist, whose case has been
highlighted by the International Humanist Ethical Union. His father
had Mr Bala sectioned for expressing doubts about religion and he
got out, two weeks ago, only because of a strike at the hospital.
Nor will Alexander Aan— the scientist in Indonesia who
was arrested and imprisoned for two years for expressing doubts
about God — be present. But many similar activists from Africa and
Asia will be there, including Gululai Ismail, who runs the Aware
Girls project in northwest Pakistan, challenging patriarchy and
religious extremism, and under constant threat of violence. It was
her organisation that Malala Yousafzai was working for when shot by
the Taliban.

It is clear that the kind of rational scepticism that we British
have been tolerating for three centuries is resulting in terrible
persecution throughout the Muslim world, and it is getting worse. I
say we tolerate atheism here, and we do, but still grudgingly.
Atheists lose count of the number of times we are told we are
lacking in imagination and wonder, or that we just don’t see the
human need for spirituality, or that we must have trouble
justifying morality.

British Christians are generally prepared to be much ruder about
atheism than they are about Islam. Some of the stuff Professor
Dawkins has to read about himself would be condemned as hate speech
if said about a Muslim. This is partly because atheists do not
threaten our critics with violence, whereas any “Islamophobic”
remark or cartoon leads to death threats. It is also because
Christians are continually trying to make common cause with other
religions in defence of “faith” as a source of morality and harmony
in the world. Did I dream it, or did a recent archbishop muse about
the virtues of Sharia?

Anglicanism is a mild and attenuated form of the faith virus and
may even act as a vaccine against more virulent infections, but
Christianity is becoming more evangelical in response to its global
competition with Islam. This has always happened in religious
history: where religions compete, they become more extreme — the
crusades, the 30-years war, Ulster.

So for all the pious talk of “faith communities”, the two
religions are not on the same side. To combat the rise of radical
Islam and radical Christianity, we should try the secular,
free-thinking approach. Mild Anglicanism should make common cause
with humanists in defence of tolerance.

The experience of the past three centuries is that if lots of
people stop believing in gods, they do not become less moral. On
the contrary, the number of people attending church has gone down
at about the same rate as the number of people who commit violent
crimes. I am not suggesting a causal connection — though I suspect
religious people would if the trends were different — but these
facts give the lie to the idea that godlessness leads to
immorality. (And don’t tell me that communist regimes were
irreligious — they enforced a worship of their leaders with all the
techniques and fervour of religion.)

Unlike the almost triumphalist mood among atheists in the 1960s,
when Francis Crick foresaw the end of religion and started a
competition for what to do with the college chapels in Cambridge,
rationalists no longer expect to get rid of religion altogether by
explaining life and matter: they aim only to tame it instead, and
to protect children from it. Nonetheless, they are slowly winning:
witness the fact that more than 12 per cent of
funerals in this country are now humanist in some form. And
humanists are showing no signs of turning intolerant, let alone
violent.