Wednesday 25 November, 2009

UK
Family
Education

New humanist poster features children from a Christian family.

By Andrew Halloway

Those who think God doesn’t have a sense of humour might do well to reflect on the British Humanist Association’s gaffe in their latest advertising campaign.

The Times has discovered that the children pictured in their advert – who are supposed to be shining examples of non-religious children – are actually kids from an evangelical Christian family!

The girl and boy, chosen to be the poster children for the latest atheist attack on religion, have the kind of happy, smiley faces that Richard Dawkins associates with the superiority of ‘free-thinkers’ like himself.

The posters carry the slogan: ‘Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself’ next to photos of the children and a selection of labels like ‘Buddhist child’, ‘Protestant Child’ and ‘Catholic Child’.

But the joke is firmly on the BHA. Charlotte, 8, and Ollie, 7, are the son and daughter of committed Christian musician Brad Mason, the drummer in worship leader Noel Richards’ band. Brad is also a web designer and photographer, supplying his pictures to photo libraries who sell them to the publishing and advertising industry.

Brad says: “It is quite funny, because obviously they were searching for images of children that looked happy and free. They happened to choose children who are Christian. It is ironic. The humanists obviously did not know the background of these children.

“Obviously there is something in their faces which is different. So they judged that they were happy and free without knowing that they are Christians. That is quite a compliment. I reckon it shows we have brought up our children in a good way and that they are happy.”

The BHA refused to get the joke, saying that whether the models used are Christian or not, the point still stands that they shouldn’t be labelled as Christian or humanist or anything else.

Now, on that point, the BHA are being a bit disingenuous. For they know they have no real argument with Christians about this. Christians, and evangelicals in particular, believe that people don’t become Christians by being born into a Christian family. They have to make their own mind up about whether to believe in Jesus or not.

In fact Justin Thacker, head of theology at the Evangelical Alliance, welcomed the campaign, saying: “It is great to see that the humanists are now agreeing that children have to make their own decisions about faith. Evangelicals do not believe that God has any grandchildren; only children. You are not a Christian simply because your parents are. Every child or adult has to make up their own mind about the reality of God.”

So what is the real point the BHA are trying to make? It doesn’t take too much investigation to discover that it’s an insinuated attack on faith schools and the teaching of religion to children by churches or even state schools. It’s no accident that another BHA poster says: ‘No faith schools’.

Andrew Copson, BHA director of education, says: “The labelling of children becomes even worse when it is implemented as a matter of public policy. One of the issues we hope to highlight with these adverts is the continuing and increasing segregation of children according to parental religion in state-funded ‘faith schools’. Social cohesion and preparation for life in a diverse society is best achieved in inclusive community schools, where children from different backgrounds learn with and from each other without being divided by labels that they are not old enough to have chosen for themselves.”

Basically, the BHA and Dawkins are against children, as he puts it, being ‘indoctrinated’ or ‘brainwashed’ into religion. Now that argument might carry some weight were it not for the fact that Dawkins has supported summer camps for the children of atheists, where the kids are taught all about atheism. But apart from that hypocrisy, there is a much bigger untruth going on here.

The truth is that all children, whether of religious or non-religious families, are influenced by their upbringing. Children brought up in atheistic, nihilistic or agnostic families are just as likely to be ‘brainwashed’ into those philosophies as children raised in religious families are into their parents’ religion.

Children do not grow up in a vacuum. State schools with no religious bias whatsoever still pass on to kids the worldview of the teachers – and it is not neutral. Everyone has values of some sort. As we live in a mainly materialistic, hedonistic, morally liberal society, that is the philosophy that is passed on to kids in non-religious schools. The morality and standards of faith schools is a partial antidote to that kind of corrupting indoctrination.

But I would also credit human beings with more intelligence and independence than the BHA obviously does. Children are not automatons, unable to think for themselves. Admittedly, the younger they are the more likely they are to accept unquestioningly what adults tell them but, as we all know, children begin to form their own opinions and establish their own identity as they grow up. In fact, as they hit their teens, children from religious families are just as likely to rebel against their parents’ beliefs as they are to accept them.

The BHA and other atheists seem to think that once children are ‘labelled’ with a religion or philosophy they are destined to espouse it for ever. It’s simply not true. And that’s shown by the fact that many people who choose for themselves to become Christians do so as adults, not as children.

And if the BHA also thinks that we shouldn’t impart any values to our children, but let them make up their own minds about morality, then they are truly naïve. As all parents know, children given no moral guidance default to whatever pleases themselves – at the expense of everyone else. That is a route to moral chaos, the end of society, or the end of civilisation as we know it! Anyone who doubts that ought to read William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies.

In any case, a neutral upbringing is impossible. The only question is, which upbringing is best?

Even our morality-free zone that calls itself a government still retains some admirable goals. For example, Labour is positively missionary-minded when it comes to tolerance, racism, sexism and discrimination of many kinds. Political correctness is the new religion. I don’t think any atheist I know of would suggest that children be left to make up their own minds about whether racism is acceptable or even whether murder and rape are right or wrong. Children should be taught to grow up respecting all people equally, regardless of ethnicity.

And by the way, Christian schools are better at doing this than others, because they teach children the biblical view that God created us all equal. Without that belief, why should racism be regarded as wrong? After all, anyone who believes we are all just animals in a battle of the survival of the fittest will look at the races and decide that the strongest should survive and the rest can go to the wall. And that’s exactly what some Social Darwinists of the last century did. They called themselves Nazis.

Muslim parents actively choose Christian schools in preference to non-faith schools because they believe those schools are more likely to inculcate tolerance of their own religion than normal state schools – a ‘some faith is better than no faith’ attitude.

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, educated in a Church of England school, says: “I got more tolerance in that Christian school than I suspect I might have had if I had gone to a secular school where no faith was taken seriously at all. That was when I discovered religiously-based tolerance – the religious roots, the foundations of tolerance.”

In a sense, the BHA’s own poster gives the game away. Included among the labels in the background of the poster are the terms ‘Humanist Child’, ‘Modernist Child’, ‘Libertarian Child’ and ‘Agnostic Child’. This implies that there is no neutral position for upbringing. We all impose some kind of beliefs on our children – for good or ill.

What the BHA labels neutral schooling is in fact anti-religious schooling. Anti-faith values permeate almost all aspects of the state curriculum, often in very subtle ways.

For example, in state schools, even religion itself is taught from a non-faith position. Books and examiners, in the main, come from an evolution of religion standpoint that basically says religions evolved as man evolved, and therefore are invented by man rather than any of them being given by God. As a consequence, the default position when looking at miracles in the Bible is materialist. There is a tendency to explain them away rather than adopt a truly neutral position on them.

In any case, most atheists are not neutral when it comes to religion. BHA director Richard Dawkins himself says “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” Not exactly the position of someone who wants children to choose for themselves.

So, come on BHA, be honest. Happy, smiling children can come from families of all backgrounds – religious or not. The real question is not about labelling kids, but what we want to teach our children? …The lie that life is a purposeless and pointless accident – or the truth that we are all God’s children and, like a good Father, he wants what’s best for our lives.

Photo: BHA