Author: Ophelia Benson

Doesn’t the BBC ever want to puke on itself? Seriously. Doesn’t its gorge ever rise until it can’t stand it any more and it has to shout rude words in a hoarse voice and pour beer over its head and kick the table over? Doesn’t it ever get sick of talking babyish cant?

Secondary schools run by faith groups are better than non-religious schools at building community relations, research in England suggests. A study funded by the Church of England found faith schools were rated higher than others by Ofsted inspectors on what is called “community cohesion”. The church says its schools take all faiths seriously and look for common ground while respecting difference.

What is called by whom ‘community cohesion’? And what’s it supposed to mean? Cohesion of communities, or cohesion between communities? The first makes sense but is a decidedly mixed blessing, the second is ludicrously oxymoronic. Maybe it’s supposed to mean both, without any thought about either one, but just a brainless pious hope that we can all have everything: cohesion and commmunity and tolerance and everybody loves everybody else. Let’s train people to think they all belong to a particular ‘community,’ for preference a religious excuse me I mean ‘faith’ community, but that’s not absolutely required unless of course the people are Muslims in which case it is absolutely required; then when we’ve done that let’s train them to aim at cohesion, without ever quite explaining what we mean by that; then let’s send them all to ‘faith’ schools; then let’s urge them to look for common ground while respecting difference. Let’s give them mixed messages! Let’s make no sense at all and then look around with an air of pleased expectancy at the peaceable kingdom we have created!

The Reverend Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, says schools with a religious foundation have a particular role “in modelling how faith and belief can be explored and expressed in ways that bring communities together, rather than driving them apart. In Church of England schools that means taking all faith seriously and placing a high premium on dialogue, seeking the common ground as well as understanding and respecting difference.”

Yes take all ‘faith’ seriously because of course it is crucial to take seriously all brands of evidence-free belief, and at the same time do the impossible by squaring common ground with difference. That’s the advantage of people who take faith seriously of course – they don’t have to notice troublesome difficulties of that kind, they can just have ‘faith’ that the impossible can be done. They can talk woolly fluffy feel-good mush, and be pleased with themselves afterwards.

Not surprisingly, Keith Porteous Wood is the one person quoted in the article who makes any sense, by pointing out the obvious –

“The very existence of minority faith schools is a major impediment to cohesion, especially where members tend also to be from ethnic and cultural minorities. Such schools tend to be mono-religious, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural, quite often of children from communities that are already separate from mainstream society.”

Yes but if everyone just keeps saying faith and cohesion and community over and over and over again, it will all work out in the end, surely.

Greta Christina puts it well.

Religion is a hypothesis about how the world works, and why it is the way it is. Religion is the hypothesis that the world is the way it is, at least in part, because of immaterial beings or forces that act on the material world.

It’s other things too, but the significant bit is this hypothesis of an immaterial world acting on the material one. ‘The hypothesis that there is a supernatural world, and that the natural world is the way it is because of the supernatural one.’

Quite so. And a hypothesis of that kind makes a difference to how people think and act, and it does have to be open to discussion and dispute. It should not must not cannot be walled off from discussion and dispute.

Another entry in the ledger where we keep track of the claim that ‘compassion is at the heart of every religion’.

The report into clerical abuse in Dublin archdiocese reveals the “reprehensible behaviour” of the Catholic hierarchy…The report finds the Catholic hierarchy and state authorities failed to respond to allegations of clerical child abuse made against a sample of 46 priests…”The Dublin archdiocese behaved in a manner that was absolutely reprehensible. Over the space of 20 years, they moved the problem on, looked after their own financial interests, looked after their priests and not the victims. The archdiocese is centre-stage. Once you read it, it jumps out at you,” a source said.

The Dublin archdiocese, then, protected its own people, who were all grown men, and by doing so perpetuated harm to children. Offhand, that does not sound conspicuously compassionate. The priests doubtless needed compassion, but first of all they needed to be stopped. They did not need compassion in the form of being allowed to go on abusing children, and the children certainly did not need compassion-for-priests in that form.