The banning of prayers from Council meetings
I expect you will have heard the news yesterday that a High Court judge has ruled that it is unlawful to begin local council meetings with a prayer.
This all arose because Clive Bone, an atheist member of Bideford town council, challenged the practice of saying prayers at council meetings and he took the case to court with the backing of the National Secular Society. The judge ruled that this did not breach Bone’s human rights or amount to discrimination. But he did conclude that it was “not lawful” to say prayers as part of formal meetings under a clause of the 1972 Local Government Act.
So Bideford has become the unlikely epicentre of a controversy sending shockwaves across the nation. ‘Where is it going to end?’ commented one town councillor. ‘It’s eroding the whole basis of Christian life in this country.’ And the Bishop of Exeter said: ‘I’ve got no doubt the agenda of the National Secular Society is inch by inch to drive religion out of the public sphere. If they get their way it will have enormous implications for prayers in parliament, Remembrance day, the jubilee celebrations, even the singing of the national anthem.’
On the other hand there are hundreds of comments posted on the internet expressing support for the judge’s decision and their sense that: religion is antiquated and irrelevant; it is a matter of personal choice and should never be imposed on others; saying prayers is just superstitious and should have no place in a civic context, like a council meeting; only 7% of the population in this country are practising Christians – what right have they to impose their religion on everyone else?
I doubt whether this court decision will prove to be either the landmark victory the National Secular Society is claiming, or the death knell of England as a Christian country. I would be surprised if it will change very much in itself. But it does act as a kind of barometer to show how society has changed and is changing. For many years now, over a period of decades, the country has been moving away from an overtly Christian culture towards a secular one. So school assemblies tend now to be moral messages rather than acts of worship. Christian hymns in school have been replaced by songs with no reference to God – if anything is sung at all. The Lord’s prayer is rarely taught or said. In R.E. children are not taught what ‘we believe’ but what Christians believe, and what Muslims believe, and so on.
It is important to note that this issue has nothing to do with political correctness towards other faiths. It is not Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Sikhs who are calling for prayers to be banned in civic places but the National Secular Society. I’ve just read a book arguing that the largest and fastest growing faith in Britain today is secular humanism. And this ‘should be regarded as Christianity’s principal, most attractive and most formidable rival in contemporary Britain’ (Alan Billings, Making God Possible, p. 143).
Secular humanism has no official creed and no membership or teaching – rather there are subtle shifts in our underlying culture which somehow influence the nation’s corporate world view. These shifts include a movement away from public religion towards individual spirituality – people have the right to practise their own faith if they want to but they have no right to impose this on anyone else. A shift away from belief in life beyond death towards thinking that this world is all there is. The only sense in which we live on is in other people’s memories and the achievements we leave behind. A shift away from divine authority to human reason. A shift away from objective values (a sense of absolute right and wrong) towards a consequentialist morality – things are right or wrong depending on their consequences.
Secular humanists may be atheists or agnostics – but perhaps more dangerous than either of these, they may simply be indifferent to the idea of God altogether. Billings argues that secular humanism in its agnostic form has a certain overlap with Christianity – a sense of the goodness of human nature, the importance of equality and harmony, the value of each and every person. So people who have grown up with some sort Christian belief can slide into humanism almost without noticing. The temptation for many, he suggests, ‘is to see humanism as Christianity without supernaturalism and, crucially, without church’ (p. 143). People might begin by thinking that you don’t have to go to church to believe in God. But after the habit of church going is broken, the transition from belief to unbelief may be the final and logical step.
So what should be our response to this?
First of all, we should give thanks that the tide of secularism has risen less high here in Addingham, and in this part of Wharfedale in general, than it has across the nation as a whole. Our attendances at St. Peter’s are above the average. The church is still seen by the village as the natural place to meet to remember the dead from the world wars, to celebrate the Queen’s forthcoming jubilee.
The parish council welcomed the offer from the Addingham Churches Together to conduct an annual service in the main street for the switching on of the Christmas lights. The Brownies, Guides, Beavers, Cubs and Scouts have been glad to come to St. Peter’s for an annual carol service. Whereas in Bradford there is a concern that more and more funerals are being taken by humanists, in Addingham the majority are still keen to come to church to mark the passing of those they love. There is no sign of any drop in the number of baptisms or weddings – though I was taken aback once when a wedding couple asked to see my wedding address in advance to check whether it fitted their philosophy of marriage! And we have strong links with the Primary School even though it is not a church school.
Secondly, we should avoid the temptation to be righteously indignant over this particular news item. The Church of England has enjoyed special privileges as the state religion. Now it is clear that Christianity is a minority faith we run the risk of appearing unreasonable and childish if we complain about the erosion of these privileges. I doubt if many people have come to faith through prayers in a council chamber. You cannot force people to believe through compulsory exposure to religion. There are some who would argue that the church was at its most authentic while it was marginalised and persecuted in its early history – when it became the religion of the Roman empire and was bound up with the trappings of secular power it became fatally compromised.
Thirdly, we must pray. If our society is becoming prayer-less we must become more prayerful. If the world is becoming indifferent to God then we must become more passionate in our faith. For each act of prayer is a creed: when we pray we are saying that there is a God, and more than that – that we can have a personal relationship with God – and more than that, that prayer has the power to change things.
Prayer is not an optional extra you tack on to the beginning of the real business. It goes to heart of all we stand for. It is the real business in itself. If you are a Christian everything should be done in the spirit of prayer; that is, in everything we should seek to know God’s will and place it above our own. Every meeting, every decision, every purpose, every single day every should begin in prayer.
There does not seem to be much evidence to support the secular humanists’ faith in the goodness of human reason, alone. If you watch the news, or read the paper, or listen to your friends and neighbours you will know the world is greatly in need of prayer. If this court case is a sign of our times and prayer is disappearing from most people’s agenda, then maybe that is God’s way of telling it is time we prayed even harder.
Andrew Tawn
12th February 2012
