Stockholm Syndrome

The Case for Christian Schools Part 4

Many of our educators, enthralled by the idol of relativism, are preaching it loud and clear. Many Christian schools have fallen so much in love with it that they have forgotten even the desire to escape.

Even those Religious Education teachers who do acknowledge the relativistic bias of their subject are sometimes happy to defend it. Some say that first, the students are not interested in learning about religious traditions in their own right, and second, they consider such teaching to be tantamount to preaching– and that’s a dirty word. After all, who might dare to tell them what to think, when they have been told from the outset that they themselves as individuals are the sole arbiters of truth? So, I am told, they switch off.

Yet, we might ask: how many teenagers are really interested in Shakespeare, photosynthesis, trigonometry or the Second World War? And really, who cares what “some Christians” or “some Muslims” believe if none of it can possibly be true? From what I can tell, many of the teenagers being made to study like this could not care less, as long as they get the A* grade. But we persist in teaching them these things regardless of their interest, presumably because whoever is in charge of the curriculum thinks they have some intrinsic value.

In other subject areas, it would be unthinkable to define the syllabus purely according to student interest. The way in which we choose to teach any subject and the content we choose to include in it are both subject to value judgments.

Even the belief in objectivity and neutrality is itself a truth-claim with a particular, value-laden tradition being it:    

The belief that there are objective values on which any rational being can agree, is itself rooted in a particular tradition – the tradition of European, and particularly British Liberalism. Instead of searching for an objective set of virtues beyond any one religious or moral system, we could begin from the particularity of religious and moral systems. – The Fruit of the Spirit, Church of England Education Office, p.12

The objection that teaching religious doctrine is tantamount to preaching is a delusion, because relativism is itself a position being preached at the pupils both by word and example, especially when Religious Studies teachers feign agnosticism as a supposedly neutral position. When we teach religions in dribs and drabs, with no overarching narratives behind them, and posit them as arbitrary and relative truth-claims, we are making a surreptitious truth-claim of our own: that we inhabit a vantage point from which we can objectively view and judge those religions. That somehow, we secular westerners are extra-traditional, hovering in virtual helicopters above and outside the genealogy of ideas.

The secular imperative of tolerance dictates that all positions must be equally respected regardless of their intellectual merit. What this results in is that all positions are equally suspected. That this is itself the particular position of one historically conditioned intellectual tradition, enforced not by persuasion but by the threat of social ostracism or even incarceration for daring to advocate an incompatible position, is unacknowledged. And this is the one and only intellectual tradition which cannot be challenged, because it is not even acknowledged as an intellectual tradition. It is simply to be accepted, dogmatically, as the one incontrovertible truth: a dogma which the teacher must preach or suffer the consequences.

The methodology of academic Religious Studies has been complicit in this idolatry of relativism. The sociological study of religions, as opposed to the intra-traditional study of theology, is based on the assumption of a secular orthodoxy by which religions are judged and from which they are ultimately condemned as deviations, arbitrary personal decisions not to conform: or, to use the Greek-derived word for ‘choices,’ heresies.

Yet in strictly historical terms, the reverse is true. From ancient Judaism sprung the sect we now call Christianity, and six centuries later, Jewish and heterodox Christian movements were midwives to Islam. From the perspective of Judaism, both Christianity and Islam are heretical offshoots. Christians and Muslims can debate this designation: Christians can argue that Rabbinal Judaism differs from Second Temple Judaism and that our religion is a proper continuation of the latter, and Muslims can argue that both Jewish and Christian textual tradition is corrupt, hence the need for the pristine revelation of the Qur’an. Subsequently, each of these titanic offspring outgrew their parents in number, establishing their own orthodoxies within bounded geographical domains. Nonetheless, chronologically, each is a “heresy” – literally, a choice to separate – from what came before.

Like Christianity and Islam, secularism did not come from nowhere. It most certainly did not exist before religions did, as though there were some early non-religious humanity on which religion was a later imposition. So while secularist orthodoxy seems intent on patricide – or at least shuffling its embarrassing parents off to a rest home where they can rant at one another and be forgotten by the young – it too must own up to its place in the genealogy of ideas. And the fact is that it was born not in Arabia or China or Africa, but in Europe: Christian, post-Reformation Europe, at that. In the history of ideas, secularism is a “heresy” which broke off from Christianity.

I am not using the word “heresy” to make a value judgment here. An orthodox Christian is, in one sense, a Jewish heretic. It has taken the horror of the Holocaust for Christians to admit culpability and seek understanding and forgiveness, yet at last there is something of a rapprochement nowadays between Jews and Christians, more of a sense of filial piety developing as Christians discover hidden depths of their own faith in that of their parent.

But put the shoe on the other foot. Where do we hear secularists aiming at the same kind of reconciliation with their own intellectual progenitor, the Christian faith? Richard Dawkins has started to make some very muted noises in that direction, but his weak praise for “cultural Christianity” does not amount to much. By and large, despite the horrors of the French Revolution and of systematic state atheism imposed under Communist regimes, the tens of millions executed for dissent (many of them for daring to cling to the Christian faith), advocates of secular modernity have made little attempt even to acknowledge, let alone understand, its displaced sire, and certainly not to make amends. Secularism is still in its teenage years, able only to see its parents’ faults. Only now that secular atheism has children of its own, such as the Silicon Valley transhumanists of whom the transgender activists are forerunners crying in the wilderness, do its veteran leaders like Dawkins start to see their forebear in a more favourable light.

Christian schools have to recognise that the secularist assumptions on which so much Religious Studies teaching is based are not merely indifferent, and certainly not neutral, but in fact actively hostile to Christianity and to all religious orthodoxy. Church schools claiming ‘neutrality’ in their teaching of religion are in fact collaborating in the neutralisation not only of Christian truth-claims but, ironically, with those truth-claims it shares with other religions, and replacing them with the rival philosophy of relativism. It’s time they stopped being in thrall of their captor.