Guardian comment by Andrew Copson on House of Lords debate 19th April 2007

Andrew Copson

Andrew Copson

Andrew Copson is responsible for education and public affairs at the British Humanist Association.

Without God on your side

Those with no religion risk being marginalised, but will today's debate in the House of Lords help?

April 19, 2007 10:00 AM

It may seem rather eccentric to some that the House of Lords has dedicated this morning to a debate on the rights of the non-religious. After all, Britain is an increasingly secular place. Social attitudes are largely non-religious and the personal freedoms we enjoy have expanded over the last 60 years as religiously motivated restrictions that caused so much misery - laws against divorce, against abortion, against homosexuality - have been removed. Unlike in some countries, we don't have to fear a death penalty for giving up our religion, or even the sort of social opprobrium that atheists face in countries like the US. What have the non-religious got to complain about?

The answer is quite a lot and, although this debate may have seemed unnecessary even a decade ago, right now it is timely - if not overdue. Ten years ago no one dreamt of the increase in the number and type of state-funded religious schools that the current government has promoted (before 1997 applications for new faith schools were being turned down). A third of state schools are already faith schools and expanding this provision can only worsen the situation for non-religious parents, who often cannot get their children into their local state school because it happens to be a faith school. Ironically, in some areas - especially rural ones - non-religious parents face the opposite problem: they have no choice but to send their child to a faith school because it is the only state school in the area and once there, children can find that their own developing non-religious beliefs and values are ignored and the beliefs of their parents denigrated or censured. It is not just non-religious pupils and parents who are disadvantaged in this way - faith schools are also permitted to discriminate in their employment, and in November last year the government actually extended the rights of faith schools to discriminate.

The faith-based approach that the current government has adopted over the last decade is not limited to the unpopular increase in faith schools. As part of its determination to contract out the provision of public services, the Department for Work and Pensions is actively encouraging religious groups to take over aspects of our welfare state. This is certainly going to impact on non-religious workers in this sector, if current examples of religious public service providers are anything to go by. Crossreach, "one of the largest social care agencies in Scotland", is a social care agency run by the Church of Scotland. Most of their funding is public money - it comes from local authorities - but take a look at the recruitment section of their site and you find that applicants for every job currently advertised are "required to have a Christian commitment". Might health and social care professionals soon find they have to lie about their beliefs or get a letter from the local church if they want a job, in the same way as so many parents already do in order to ensure that their child can attend a local school?

In employment and education the situation is certainly getting worse for the non-religious (even as we increase in number) but there is another process in train, with the potential to be just as pernicious. The government now isolates religion as the principle marker of identity, and with "multicultural" increasingly used to mean "multi-faith", we risk making a fetish of one attribute which, while very important to some, is a total irrelevance to many more. The website of the Department of Communities and Local Government, under whose auspices this work now falls, says: "The traditions of all major faiths contain teachings commending the fundamental values of equality and respect which are so important to community cohesion." The appropriation of key human virtues as the typical characteristics of religious believers, with the implicit or explicit suggestion that these virtues are not shared by the non-religious, is becoming a constant offensive irritation to non-believers, and politicians all-too often aggravate the situation. Hazel Blears, for example, in a recent speech to rabbis and imams, contrasted the virtues of the religious with the idea of society becoming "more secular, more consumerist, [and] more avaricious".

It is this tendency, as much as the increase in actual disadvantage suffered by the non-religious, against which peers in parliament are speaking today, and if the next decade is to be any better for the non-religious than the last, we must hope that the government is listening.