Thoughts about secularism
I’ve recently been following many, generally painful and non-constructive, discussions on the SRE on trial page of Facebook. I don’t want to rehash the arguments here, but question an assumption of those who promote the ethics course. My bugbear is when people claim secular ethics as worldview-neutral and therefore isn’t a challenge to organised, for want of a better term, religion. If that were the case, how can it be considered for the SRE time slot? (However, I would like to add that this is more constructive than discussions about the appropriateness of SRE in schools at all. From what I understand, that’s not up for debate.)
This struck me as I heard about the recent French vote, in the lower house, to ban the burka.
Justice minister Michele Alliot-Marie says the approval was a success for French republican values of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularism.
I am yet to work out how it is a win for liberty. How a ban on public religious practise equals freedom. It seems to me, from a possibly ill-informed outsider looking in, that the desire for secularism is greater than the right to personal self-expression. In the end, it gives me the impression that secularism sits in judgment over religion and wants to push what it thinks is good or bad for an individual. Equality becomes less about equality, but uniformity. No longer the right the choose, but the assumption that all will choose the same.
Why did this particularly strike me this week?
I’ve been preparing sermons on 1 Timothy for later this year and have been dwelling on this very bold, very absolute, very modernist statement:
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all (1 Tim 2:5-6)
Paul doesn’t have any sense of diplomacy or tact as he states the truth. Regardless of what the prevailing view might have been in the cosmopolitan Ephesus, regardless of the culture of the day, there is one God. And there is only one God. And the only mediation between God and humanity. Jesus Christ who died, that we might know this one God.
Hi Josh
I’ve been watching (and occasionally wading into) the SRE/Ethics debate too. I think you’re right in saying the the appropriateness of SRE in schools is not up for debate, if I understand you correctly to mean that’s the case at an official level within the DET. In fact the St James Ethics Centre says that they see the Ethics Course as complementary to SRE in schools (though how that would work if it’s run in the same time slot is a bit of a mystery).
At a community level, though, I think that there are folk who see the Ethics Course trial as the perfect opportunity to gain some leverage to have SRE removed from schools, for reasons ranging from personal “bad experiences” to strong (but misapplied) views on the separation of church and state. In the some of the online conversations I’ve participated in there is a lot of debate along those lines.
Hi Josh
There is little doubt certain secularists (for want of a better term) if they are polite enough to tolerate us practicing our faith, certainly want to define how we do it. What this generally amounts to is patronising statements like “Believe what you want but keep it to yourself” which flies in the face of our great commission which is central to us practicing our faith.