Behind the Idol
The Case for Christian Schools 6
Idols do not come from nowhere. They are, by definition, made. So who has made the idol of relativism? And why?
Let’s return to curriculum content, and the reasoning behind editorial decisions there. I have argued that there is no such thing as a neutral curriculum, and that the supposed ‘neutrality’ of the skills agenda is really a crypto-curriculum for relativism. The content of everything we teach is chosen by someone. If you really wanted to teach with true neutrality, you would either have to teach absolutely everything or absolutely nothing. The decision of what constitutes educational merit is always going have political ramifications. This is particularly so in the study of Religious Education, but is equally applicable to the study of English, History, and even the sciences.
Religious positions have been rendered matters of mere private opinion with no place in public life, and this is already a reality in most schools. No doubt even the largely flouted law in England which requires schools to provide acts of worship of a “generally Christian character” will eventually be formally abandoned. Without Christianity serving even as the notional norm, there is no incontestable publicly shared purpose for British society. So, the Government must either permit anarchy or impose a set of values. Partly under the aegis of its Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, it has chosen to do the latter, sometimes with chilling results. It was under Prevent, for example, that a school chaplain I know in an ostensibly Evangelical school was fired for preaching that pupils could make up their own minds about the credibility of modern gender ideology. By all means read his sermon here and decide whether you agree that it constitutes a call to terrorism.
Such preaching is deemed an affront to Whitehall’s dreamt-up set of “British values.” But, with no reasoned argumentation to support these values, they too are easily written off by savvy pupils as just another arbitrary choice to accept or reject as a matter of taste: the old groundless authority of the Church has simply been replaced with the new groundless authority of the State. Why listen to either?
Even Britain’s nominally Conservative government has for too long evinced a craven unwillingness openly to make value-judgments and truth claims. These have been conceded as purely private matters for the conscience of the individual. The idea that the pursuit of truth or goodness might be a proper object of politics is routinely rejected as “ideology,” a dirty word among our political masters and the media who curate their reputations. That they may be perpetuating an anonymous ideology seems to have struck too few and too late, and only as they are faced with electoral extinction. It would be hard these days to call them the party of God, Church and King.
The Labour Party, meanwhile, has distanced itself from the Christian Socialism which was once a staple element of its “broad church,” submitting internally to an aggressively atheist, post-Marxist wing that the respectable face of the leadership is trying hard to hide. These activists are unabashedly ideological, but theirs is hardly an ideology which will unite the nation. Indeed, there is evidence that their ideology is being propagated through the social media activities of hostile states specifically to foment division in the West, indicated for example by the suppression on TikTok of material promoting the causes of the Uighur, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Ukraine, and its promotion of the Hamas cause. As a source of news and platform for free exchange of ideas, social media makes the Murdoch empire look like a paragon of neutrality and balance.
As long as the centre-Left and centre-Right remain committed to a liberal, free-market approach to ideas, it has nothing with which to oppose the tyranny of the extremes. Liberal opposition to ideology is supposed to leave a neutral space for objective reflection and open discussion, but in reality, all it leaves is a vacuum that is easily filled. With such qualitative and abstract pursuits as truth or goodness neatly out of the way, the purpose of a liberal government is reduced only to the indisputable and objective truths which can be quantified by numbers. And so money fills the gap. Wealth generation becomes not just a part of national life, but the only acceptable topic of public discourse. What wealth is actually for is a matter of purely private concern. So, we should not be surprised to find education reduced to little more than the handmaid of the maximisation of economic productivity.
Some Gradgrindian headteachers go along with this quite explicitly. I remember one being virtually tarred and feathered on Twitter a few years ago for claiming that music and art have no place in schools, as these are merely hobbies, with no economic purpose. Children are nothing more than potential units of wealth-production. Children are schooled only to become useful members of society. In a way, it was refreshing to hear a headmaster come clean about this. Most would not go so far in public. But while paying lip-service to the ‘value of creativity,’ many head teachers will still cut curriculum time for creative and artistic subjects and for the humanities to make way for the more serious pursuits of science, mathematics, business and law. English is taken seriously, though not for its literary and cultural value: its value is primarily in enabling efficient communication for commercial and scientific concerns. Many parents applaud head teachers for doing this, and the teachers of “academic” subjects can be heard sneering about the “soft options” behind closed staffroom doors when they think their colleagues are out of earshot. They now have government attainment targets in the “essential” subjects to back up their cause.
So we excise childish “hobbies” like music, art and drama from the curriculum. We put religions into their little boxes, relegate them to the sphere of private opinion, embarrassing childhood toys to be stuffed in the attic. All must make way for the grown-up pursuits of science and commerce. A token trace of literature, history, religious studies and PSHE is allowed to remain, just as long as it perpetuates the creed of relativism which keeps private interests in charge. Thus relativism, inadvertently clearing a path for the worship of wealth, segues into utilitarianism.
But for whose benefit? Look closely enough at the marks on the idol, and its maker will be revealed. Let’s go back to my Religious Studies classroom. This time, it’s a discussion about sex before marriage. One girl says that it’s absolutely vital, because, in her words: “you’ve got to try before you buy.” Her friends nod sagely. Think back to the earlier classroom episode, where one boy asked how anyone could possibly choose any one religion out of all of those available.
Trying. Buying. Choice. These are the marks the maker has left on the idol. Where are they coming from? Do we really believe that they are naturally begotten, not made? That they are “neutral,” value-free?
Our young, unburdened by the tradition of Europe’s Christian past, are brought up to think that they are fiercely independent free-thinkers, encouraged to express whatever opinion they like. Yet, despite their apparent freedom in the topical discussions of the PSHE or Religious Studies classroom, these young free-thinkers overwhelmingly default to a single opinion, whether on dress, or abortion, or salvation: it is up to the individual to decide. There is no point debating any further, because there is never any implication that there might be any truth behind any religious claims. Religious beliefs are therefore presented as purely arbitrary decisions, matters of taste, based on the individual believers’ choice of one-liners from their preferred brand of scripture. Or Little Red Book. Or Instagram post.
Whether it’s religions or potential mates, the bottom line is that everything is a product. Each is just one choice among many in the supermarket of personal values. And the individual is the neutral, liberated consumer who can take their pick from the shelves.
In other words, we have inculcated in our pupils an ideological analogue to consumer capitalism. And yet the acquisition of consumer goods and the ideological parallel of self-confected identities does not seem to be making us happier. Rarely do you see the faces of those who constantly tap out their addiction on glowing screens glow with equal ardour. Generally their faces are harassed and tense, anxious as the little red message count rises, so engrossed in their virtual world that the real world of, say, families and children becomes an obstacle met with frustration. Parents get angry with their children for interrupting the non-stop screen time, then wonder why the little ones grow up incapable of meaningful relationships or even basic social interaction.
Not that commerce is a bad thing. Even consumerism has its place. I wrote this on a desirable Apple computer, which would never have reached its current evolution without serious consumer investment. I wrote it in my house, paid for by money which people paid me. Even if you work in the State sector, you are reliant on private wealth-generation for the taxes which pay your wage. It would be naive in the extreme to suggest that employability, skills and increasing pupils’ potential to generate wealth have no place in education. If anything, these skills can greatly help reduce inequality. The problem starts when wealth-creation becomes not just a means, but the only agreed end, and when the consumeristic way of thinking which it inculcates has no rival.
Certainly, from any mainstream religious point of view, reducing everything, including people, to consumer products, relating to the world purely in terms of its use to me, is an impoverished view of reality. It is one which leads to the devaluation of those who earn less. This in turn contributes to the declining self-worth and insecurity which can lead to restiveness and violence, especially in young men. A culture which makes wealth the sole measure of a person is always going to alienate those who fail to live up to that measure - especially when the expectations of ownership are inflated by an entertainment industry that idolises men with big houses, guns, hot cars and fast girls.
So who benefits from this in the end? Well, it is in the interest of unscrupulous employers to have a ready workforce with a crippled moral compass and a laissez-faire attitude to truth. We don’t want them asking those awkward questions about our business ethics. How convenient that those questions can all be relegated to matters of private opinion and driven from the factory floor. We can further divert attention by forcing you to wear a rainbow lanyard and a badge with your pronouns. But you can take that cross from round your neck when you work here. Everybody here has an equal opportunity to say nothing without our imprimatur.
It is in the interest of entertainment corporations to have a ready body of consumers who will not question the goodness of what they are watching, but will simply pay for the next endorphin hit. Are ultra-violent video games and hard-core pornography really good for you? Or, in the latter case, for the people “acting” in them? Who cares. You don’t have to justify your habits to anyone any more. You pay your price, you get your choice, and that’s all there is to it. Nothing more to say. Everything is a transaction. Everyone has their price.
It is in the interest of media moguls, state-sponsored news channels and social media corporations to have a ready body of viewers unable to distinguish truth from fiction, because then all they need to do is take money from the highest bidder and spin their story as news. Since there’s no truth anyway, may as well let the people choose which side of the story they want to consume, all for a reasonable subscription charge or the revenue for ads that will spur you on to further costly addictions.
Unencumbered by such inconveniences as children, the young are the ideal consumers, earning an almost entirely disposable income. So, best keep them childless as long as possible by not just tolerating and accepting, but actively promoting lifestyle choices which postpone – or better still, permanently neutralise – that possibility and its encumbent responsibilities. Ready contraception, easy abortion and all non-reproductive means of sexual self-expression are great boons for sales in the nightlife, alcohol, music, online gaming and fashion industries. It’s surely no coincidence that advocates of these choices are given such support by the youth-obsessed entertainment industry. Teen dramas, magazines and music consolidate the relativism being taught in the classroom, offering a range of pre-wrapped identities to choose from, laced with ads for a range of matching accessories.
The idol bears the marks of Mammon. If education is to avoid either implicitly idolising wealth, promoting a purely materialist mindset (whether socialist or capitalist), and trivialising philosophies which claim that there is a spiritual reality to life, it has to weed out the relativism and utilitarianism from its classrooms. Secular schools really have no grounds by which to do this. They are castles built on sand, with no defence against the ideological and spiritual war that is being waged on our children from a frightening array of fronts. Woe to Christian schools if we are joining them in fattening the calves for sacrifice to the idol. Our calling, now, is to resist.