Midnight on Monday found me in BBC Radio 5 Live’s studios at White City discussing faith schools with Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society. We were on Tony Livesey’s late night chat show, and the issue triggering the discussion was the news that Foreign Secretary and avowed atheist David Miliband is avoiding the local state primary school near his home in Camden and sending his five year old adopted son instead to a church school further away (here). Apparently Miliband’s wife Louise attends the Anglican church linked to the school.
It is of course amusingly reminiscent of – but less spectacular than – the decision a few years ago by left-wing former fire-brand Diane Abbott MP to shun local Hackney schools and send her son to the private £10,000-a-year City of London School (here).
But it is the disingenuous nature of Keith Porteous Wood’s National Secular Society that I want to discuss here rather than the hypocrisy or otherwise of David Miliband or Diane Abbott. I’m not surprised that, when push comes to shove, parents want to do the best for their children, nor that the Milibands have chosen a church school in order to achieve this.
But the real hypocrisy and rank cant lies with the NSS, and Keith Porteous Wood is a pleasant and occasionally formidable spokesman for this deceptive organisation. NSS is better described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The organisation likes to present itself as a benign pressure group that aims to achieve an equitable and just secular society in which religious viewpoints are appropriately represented but restricted in public life. “We campaign… against the undue influence of religion in public affairs and education,” purrs the NSS website (here) claiming they also defend values such as human rights and freedom of speech. NSS, it seems, would persuade us that it promotes a sort of ‘procedural secularism’ (to use the jargon) that includes a neutral public square where no religious worldview predominates and where the state benevolently holds the ring between alternative and often competing beliefs and creeds. This secularism entails a separation of religion and state and non-discrimination between religions by the state that guarantees plurality and religious freedom. For historical and pragmatic reasons I personally wouldn’t advocate disestablishing the national church, for instance, but for many people such ‘procedural secularism’ is an attractive way of organising public affairs, and they point to the US and India as societies where religion thrives within a secular framework.
But in fact the National Secular Society offers no such benign vision. Rather it is another vehicle for shrill and aggressive New Atheism, whose intention is not only to ride religion out of public life, but also to attack faith – especially Christianity – wherever it finds it, including in private belief and practice. According to New Atheists, religion should not even be carried on by consenting adults in private. Their virulent strain of ‘ideological secularism’ (to use the jargon again) which attempts to exclude or severely control religion in private as well as public, is what NSS in fact promotes.
How do I know? NSS’s real motives are uncovered by the ‘debaptism’ campaign currently running on the organisation’s website (here) in which we are urged to ‘Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had!’ For a ‘bit of fun’ you can also purchase from NSS your very own ‘Certificate of Debaptism’ printed, indeed, on quality parchment paper. Yippee!
Baptism of course is a sacred Christian initiation rite as old as the faith itself. It is personal to the believer and his/her family and is carried out in and by the church. It has no impact whatever on public life or wider social policy.
So why is the NSS sticking its nose into our private business? Because it is two-faced, publicly proclaiming its vocation to promote fairness and restrict religious privilege in public life whilst actually using this as a front for its all-consuming anti-Christian crusade.
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett et al are open and honest about their desire to eradicate Christianity. The duplicitous National Secular Society is not.
And that’s why Keith Porteous Wood could only talk cant about Christian and church schools on Monday night.
January 31st, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Organisations like the NSS basically want to become the new Established Religion. They want a school system which teaches their beliefs and values to the exclusion of all others and wish to use the force of law to enforce these beliefs.
Organised Atheism in the USSR and the PRC have carried out bigger persecutions of real or perceived heretics than any organised religion ever has. Stalin, Mao, the Cultural Revolution, Ceausceau, Pol Pot and North Korea reflect a pretty poor record to be preaching at others from.
May 7th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Actually there is a very much better reason for the “un-baptisms”. There are countless thousands of adults in the UK who were baptised as infants, but who no longer think of themselves as Christians, and yet organisations such as the Catholic Curch use baptismal records as a a means of stating the numbers of Catholics, and hence as a means to pressurise politicians into decisions which apparently affect many more people than is actually the case.
For years, when official forms asked for my religion, I would put C of E. It was easier than having to explain that I was an Atheist Humanist, and that, no, that did not mean I was a Communist or that I was seeking to undermine society. I was one of those miscounted people. No more. I welcome this move as a means to more accurately reflect the make-up of British society. The Church does not speak for me, and I am annoyed when Christians plead a special case on my behalf.