Jewish backing for secularist petition in Scotland?

I was a bit surprised by the headline: 'Scotland's Jews back opt-in to religion in schools' in the Sunday Herald:


SCOTLAND'S Jewish communities have backed an "opt-in" system for religious activities in non-denominational schools.

The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (SCoJeC) has raised concerns that non-Christian pupils often feel "excluded and alienated" during prayers and ceremonies, in a response to a petition by Secular Scotland which has called for an end to pupils automatically participating in religious observance. [Full article here.]

For those of you who haven't been following this, one of the current features of Scottish politics is the growing noisiness of the many (tiny) atheist groups up here who seem to think that the current constitutional uncertainty plus a rebranding of hardline atheism under a 'secularist' label might serve their purpose of undermining religion. I've blogged about this generally and, in particular, on the Scottish Secular Society (aka Secularism Scotland) and its attempts to remove religious observance from schools under the pretext of making such observance an 'opt in' rather than an 'opt out'. (Previous posts here and here.)

Given that (in particular) the former Chief Rabbi has been such an effective presence in the defence of religion in the UK, it was therefore with real disappointment that I read the article. However, the actual submission itself is rather more nuanced. (PDF here.) The first question to be asked is where did the Herald's article come from? The submission was made on 10 October according to the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities website (here): it can only be assumed that its appearance in the Herald a month later and only shortly before the secularist petition is considered by the Parliamentary committee on Tuesday is the result of spin generated by the Scottish Secularist Society. Well, fair enough, they're trying to win this thing -but it's worth bearing in mind the relentless publicity machine that is Scottish atheism.

Turning to the submission itself, the first thing to be made clear is that it rejects any attempts to undermine religious observance in denominational schools:


The situation with regard to denominational schools is different. When parents 
make a conscious decision to send their children to a denominational rather than a 
non-denominational school, they do so with  the foreknowledge that its activities 
will include the religious observances of  that faith. In this case they have, 
effectively, already opted in, and it would not be reasonable  for them then to 
demand that the school change  its ethos and practices.  We would, therefore, 
argue in favour of maintaining the status quo for these schools. 

Such clarity is extremely welcome. A key target of the atheists is undoubtedly 'Rome on the rates': the widespread provision of Catholic schools supported by the state. It's clearly unreasonable to expect Catholic (or Jewish) schools to be anything other than Catholic (or Jewish): if you send your child there, you have to put up with the ethos.

In denominational schools, it does suggest there is a 'strong case' for an opt in. But to note that there is a strong case is not in itself a clear statement of support. The submission makes a good point about the nebulousness of the definition of 'religious observance', that it is defined by Scottish government guidance as


community acts which aim to promote the spiritual development of all 
members of the school’s community and express and celebrate the shared values 
of the school community

precisely to get round the statutory requirement for religious observance without the need for changing legislation. It goes on to say:


The problem, as with all creative reinterpretations, is that the words are then left 
ambiguous between the original literal meaning and the neologism. So "religious 
observance" as redefined according to that deliberately nebulous definition, might 
be an acceptable all-school activity, but genuine religious observance – faith specific worship, dietary rules, and dress code, for example – is not. 



A fair point, fairly made. The substance of the submission is that Jewish children are being forced (or at least strongly encouraged) to take part in acts of Christian worship -and, quite reasonably, Jewish parents don't want this.

Instead, the SCOJeC submission wants a very clear right to remove children from such worship -whether by way of opt in or opt out doesn't seem in fact to matter much as far as the submission is concerned- but (and here's what you don't read in Secularism Scotland's spin) proper facilitation of religious practice for both minority and majority religious groups:


However, adequate provision must then also be made for those who do opt in, and 
not only for the majority faith. A non-denominational school must be able to 
accommodate pupils who wish to eat only  kosher or halal food, fast during 
Ramadan, observe religious festivals, or wear a hijab or a kirpan, and, where 
required, should also facilitate faith-specific worship and, faith-based counseling. A 
possible model is that of hospital chaplaincy (aka “spiritual care”) in which 
honorary chaplains are appointed from all relevant faith communities. Education is 
at least as important, so that even  if geographic considerations may present 
practical obstacles at a local level, resources should be found by central 
government. 


So, in SCoJeC's utopia, there would be:

a) community acts which express the shared values of the school community;
b) optional worship in specific religious traditions; and
c) support from the school for specific religious practices.

In other words, the 'school space' would become a genuinely multifaith space, rather than the religion free wasteland envisaged by Secular Scotland.

I've got serious doubts about the advisability of such a position. In particular, I worry over its practicality and how it leaves the vast number/majority of Scots who, whilst having no formal attachment to a religion, wouldn't put themselves in anti-religion camp of the Scottish Secular Society et al. But whatever its faults, it certainly isn't a secularist position.

There's been a lot of talk about ecumenism over the years. I'd like theistic religions in Scotland to start talking about how they can form a united front against the increasing force of new atheism in Scottish politics. It probably won't be possible to get everyone on board all the time, but it would be a shame if, as in the present case, a thoughtful raising of genuine problems with present provision, is used by atheists to destroy an existing imperfect situation and replace it with something much worse.

I'd suggest (merely as a starting point) the following basic principles in non denominational schools:

a) the recognition of the Scottish Presbyterian tradition as the historically dominant ethos of religious provision in non-denominational schools;
b) a willingness on the part of that tradition to be generous and respectful in its dealing with other religions and worldviews such as atheism;
c) the existence of clear parental opt outs from activities such as tradition specific worship or moral education in areas such as sexual relationships;
d) corporate, 'time for reflection' , which is open to as many traditions as possible, but with a view to a) and b);
e) the encouragement of religious practice among minority groups such as Jews by the provision (eg) of chaplains.

Moreover, the provision of religious schools should be supported where this is likely to be viable.

Any takers?

Looking at women

First, an apology to women readers. I'm going to be talking about how men should look at women simply because I'm a man. There's an analogous discussion to be had about how women should look at men, but I'm the wrong blogger to do it. (And there are also different discussions to be had about how men should look at men (and women at women) and although I'll touch on that here, that'll be mainly for another time perhaps...)

Chris Monloch's article in The Independent on Afghan pederasty (bacha bazi) (H/T Standing on My Head) is troubling in a number of ways. Most obviously, it is troubling because it deals with an evil practice and raises questions about the West's involvement in Afghanistan. At a slightly more theoretical level, I find Monloch's approach to the subject slightly worrying. There's clearly a history to the practice which goes beyond the recent turmoil in the area. (Wikipedia suggests that it was actually more common in the past until the colonial powers' disapproval (quote: 'Victorian era prudery' ?! -good for the Victorians!) reduced its prevalence.) It's clearly not just (as Monloch's term 'paedophilia' and much of the article suggests) the particular perversion of a few odd individuals but a socially endorsed and constructed practice. Moreover, it isn't a practice that is unknown in other societies (for example, the ancient Greek practice of pederasty is clearly analogous). If Monloch is supposed to be representative of a US intelligence expert, I'd worry that US intelligence is woefully out of its depth in dealing with other cultures, treating what is clearly a deeply embedded cultural evil as the perversion of a few damaged individuals ('rid themselves of all paedophiles')...

Anyway, putting all that aside, I was struck by the following paragraphs:


A second corrupting, and perhaps surprising, consequence of bacha bazi is its negative impact on women's rights in Afghanistan. It has become a commonly accepted notion among Afghanistan's latent homosexual male population that “women are for children, and boys are for pleasure.” Passed down through many generations and spurred by the vicious cycle created by the pedophile-victim relationship, many Afghan men have lost their attraction towards the opposite gender. Although social and religious customs still heavily dictate that all men must marry one or more women and have children, these marriages are often devoid of love and affection, and are treated as practical, mandated arrangements.

While the Afghan environment has grown more conducive to improving women's social statuses, the continued normalization of bacha bazi will perpetuate the traditional view of women as second-class citizens — household fixtures meant for child-rearing and menial labor, and undeserving of male attraction and affection.


As I posted recently, there is evidence that (at least in Japan) there is a reduction of male interest in real women. Now, that's worrying for all sorts of reasons, but one of the reasons is that it means men just aren't interested in what women really are but instead regard them as 'undeserving of male attraction and affection'. As I also recently argued, worrying about how to look at women is an important aspect of (as Foucault would put it) 'care of the self': that practice of constructing and purifying the self in the task of achieving virtue.

One of the damaging splits that has taken place in modernity is that between being interested physically in someone and being interested in them as a person. Partly as a result of crude versions of feminism, men find themselves subject to a critique on whether they like a woman for her body or for her mind. This separation is embodied (take that as a pun if you will) in a view of the development of erotic attraction: you become an achieved person erotically once you have discovered whether you like female (as a heterosexual) or male (as a homosexual) bodies. Of course, that makes erotics trivial: much more important than what sort of flesh you like is liking minds. And no one, no one openly is allowed to say that they only like male minds as the storm over Stephen Fry's twitter comments on women evidenced. It's fine if you're gay because you don't like women's bodies. It's not fine if you're gay because you don't like women (or at least their personalities).

Now, on the whole, I think this commonsense view is pure hokum. It is, I suppose, just about possible to construct a form of erotics based just on the body ('phwoarr, what a scorcher!') and I think that, in fact, is pretty much what modern society is doing. But many/most men -and I would say all good men- couldn't separate out what is attractive in women in that way: body and personality are not simply separable. It is, moreover, a separation that becomes (or at least should become) less and less plausible as you grow more mature: what might (just) be forgivable in the young (obsession with a particular body shape or part) becomes simply embarrassingly juvenile in anyone over thirty. There is nothing -absolutely nothing wrong- in men finding women erotically attractive, in looking at women erotically. But the mature male gaze is one that finds women -embodied, real women- attractive rather than women stripped of their minds and personalities and reduced to meat. Modern popular culture is busy reducing women (and men) to meat: what is striking about both pornography and fashion photography is that personality, individuality is obliterated.

Feminism -at least in many of its forms- finds the idea of a male erotic interest in women wholly problematic: men should respect women just for their minds. (Which of course then reduces any erotic interest that men might dare to have to the triviality of meat fetishism.) 

What both tendencies encourage is a separation of male interest into neat packages of physical interest (which is optional because it's just about meat) and personal interest (which is unerotic because women's minds are just like men's). But the correct male view (yes, I'm a Catholic: I'm unrepentantly normative) is one that finds women -real embodied women- attractive. If that gaze disappears, then that powerful erotic combination that is found in the idea of romantic love also disappears and we are left with societies where men prefer computer screens or boys or whatever to women; or where erotic interest is simply focused on impersonal, fungible flesh rather than anything more individual and important.

Elizabeth Campbell

Law, religion, Sir James Munby and Gorns

                                       The Judge in the Hampstead Coffee Shop.... 


Although I'd been vaguely aware of Sir James Munby's ruminations (PDF here) on the law and religion, I'd filed it mentally under the heading 'another sign of things falling apart' without giving it much attention until the Law and Religion blog got its teeth stuck into it. That blog gives it quite a respectful hearing. I'm afraid my reaction is rather different.

My overall impression of Sir James' speech is frankly disbelief that a senior legal figure should come up with something quite so superficial. I might hope it's simply rubber chicken syndrome: like many of those in the great world, he finds himself yet again invited to one of those annoying dinners where the price of entry is getting up on your hind legs and speaking; he puts something together at the last moment, utters forth to the accompaniment of soothing noises from rhubarbing middle aged men; and then settles down to wrestling with an indifferent fowl bathed in some sort of gloop. It's only a speech, you  might suspect he would say if challenged...

I fear however since it is dubbed 'a keynote address' that it must be held to rather higher standards. Much of his argument centres on the disputes between John Stuart Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen in the nineteenth century,  and Hart and Patrick Devlin in the twentieth. Both have taken on the status of symbolic struggles between a broadly libertarian view of the law as promoting the maximum amount of negative liberty subject only to the avoidance of harm (Mill and Hart) versus a view of the law as embodying substantive moral content (Stephen and Devlin). (A very brief summary of the key issues is given here.)

Now oddly enough, I'm rather on the side of Mill and Hart in this. Given the nature of our society, I'd rather have the legal protection to carry on (in Mill's terms) my experiments in living, rather than having government or other agents stepping in to curtail my negative liberty. Do I think that's an ideal state? No, but it's better than one where I -as a member of a minority (Catholic) group- am subject to state coercion to restrict or change my views or behaviour. Mill bases his view on the great importance of liberty; living your life according to your own lights is, for Mill, the central aspect of long term human happiness which he, as a utilitarian, is intent on promoting.

This rather grand and bracing vision of human nature is completely ignored by Munby who turns a debate centred on liberty into a debate centred on religion. There is little in Munby's speech about the importance of autonomy, free speech and experiments in living. Instead, we have:

Today, surely, the judicial task is to assess matters by the standards of reasonable men and 
women in 2013 – not, I would add, by the standards of their parents in 1970 – and 
having regard to the ever changing nature of our world: changes in our understanding 
of the natural world, technological changes, changes in social standards and, perhaps 
most important of all, changes in social attitudes.  (p7: PDF)

Now, according to Mill and Hart, the simple answer to this would be no: the judicial task is to make sure that I have as much negative liberty as possible subject to the harm principle:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

On the other hand, 'the standards of reasonable men and women in 2013' reads as though Munby is channelling Devlin:

How is the law-maker to ascertain the moral judgment of society?...English law has evolved and regularly uses a standard which does not depend on the counting of heads. It is that of the reasonable man. He is not to be confused with the rational man. He is not expected to reason about anything and his judgment may be largely a matter of feeling. It is the viewpoint of the man in the street -or to use an archaism familiar to lawyers -the man in the Clapham omnibus. (Devlin: The Enforcement of Morals.)

It is this blindness to the real nature of the Mill/Hart and Stephen/Devlin dispute that is most worrying about Munby. It is one thing to note that we live in an extremely fragmented society where there is no real shared substantive view of the good. For such a society, there is much to be said for Mill's view of maximizing personal liberty, the negative liberty of freedom from interference, particularly by government. In the sort of recent 'hot button' cases concerning religion, that would mean that religious minorities would have a strong presumption in favour of their right to act as they like unless clear and direct harm was being caused to others. (So B&B owners would be almost certainly be able to discriminate against unmarried couples and registrars would be able to negotiate exemptions from carrying out same sex 'marriages' etc.) It is quite another thing to suggest that, now the man on the Clapham omnibus has changed his views, we should be imposing a religion-free morality in the same way that Devlin and Stephen would have imposed a religious morality.

Of course, there may well be arguments in favour of such a Devlin-like position: Frank at Law and Religion seems to endorse Lord Justice Laws' view which is that

the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society. Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims.

In essence, the claim is that morality based on religion is subjective and the law deals only with objective morality. Frankly, this is utter tosh. The philosophical debates in this area ought to be well known, but, in short, the taking of such a view would have to respond (at least) to Macintyre's analysis of all moral thinking as taking place within a particular tradition, and the Catholic understanding of reasoning about our nature and its flourishing taking place within an Aristotelian conception of ethics rather than one based on faith. There's absolutely no sign that either Laws or Munby have even started to grapple with such considerations.

In fine, we are left with the irony that Munby is defending a position like Devlin's whilst under the apparent impression that he is supporting Mill and Hart. (It is merely that the test is now the judge in the Hampstead Coffee Shop rather than the man on the Clapham Omnibus.) If one assumes that there is one commonsense moral opinion that can, in rough terms, be discerned by the mind of the passenger on the omnibus, then the imposition of that view may be possible, even if it leaves open the further question as to whether that view (and its enforcement) is actually morally good. But the deeper challenge of post modernity -or, perhaps more narrowly, the challenge of a society that no longer coheres around a particular institutionalized worldview (such as that of the Church of England or Church of Scotland) is that there is no longer such a single worldview. There is no such thing as one secular worldview that remains after religion is subtracted.

The unnoticed confusions in the speech over the relationship between Mill's views and James' championing of a Devlin like test based on a social coherence which no longer exists suggests two conclusions. Either our great and good are too dumb to understand what they are arguing; or they know quite well what they are saying and are simply covering up their real intentions under a smog of verbiage. We can immediately reject the first possibility as too bizarre to be worth considering. I am therefore going with the assumption that our country is being run by giant alien lizards who are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to impose secular (ie Gorn) standards on us.

You read it here first...

            A member of the judiciary proposing a toast to the overthrow of  Christianity