Why parents must speak up for a Christian ethos in schools

Last month the Department of Education and Youth launched a primary school survey to inform future school planning. One of its stated aims is to establish whether there is sufficient demand to transfer Catholic schools to other patron bodies. In such cases, the building and staff remain, but the controlling authority, governing the school’s ethos and approach to religious education, changes.

The State’s efforts to facilitate this process of divestment have not been straightforward. Recent attempts in Dublin stalled because there simply was not enough parental support. Many families express approval in principle for non-denominational schooling, but when asked to relinquish a familiar ethos, they hesitate. As senior Department official Hubert Loftus told an Oireachtas committee, divestment targets cannot be met, not because of resistance from the Catholic Church or a lack of cooperation within his department, but because parental demand just isn’t there.

Questions

And yet the Department is asking the question again. The pattern is reminiscent of a remark by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during attempts to secure an EU-wide constitution. After several member states rejected the proposal in national referendums, Juncker commented: “If it’s a yes, we will say let’s proceed; if it’s a no, we will say let’s continue.” In other words: keep asking until the public gives the desired answer. Despite parents declining to divest their schools of religious patronage, the State continues to behave as though a different outcome is inevitable if the question is posed often enough.

Parents were reluctant to take up the offer to divest their schools in the past, and that reticence has most likely deepened because of recent curriculum changes and the controversies surrounding them. In this context, school patronage becomes an important safety net for parents. A patron body can either act as a bulwark against contested ideas or it can embrace and promote them.

The survey’s simple distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ patrons obscures an important point: non-religious does not mean neutral. Every patronage model carries assumptions about human nature, morality, and social order. Parents need to ask themselves whether those assumptions are coherent, transparent, and compatible with the safeguarding and flourishing of children.

In doing so, they provided the moral vocabulary for every subsequent civil-rights movement”

Historian Tom Holland, in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, argues that many of our most cherished moral instincts, belief in the equal worth of every person, compassion for the weak, and the conviction that suffering demands a response, emerged from Christian thought. Without that heritage, he warns, these values risk losing their grounding. Theologian Nigel Biggar likewise stresses that modern concepts of rights and moral agency rest on a tradition that is unmistakably Christian in origin.

The 18th-century abolitionist movement illustrates this vividly. William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equiano, and their contemporaries opposed slavery because they believed all human beings are created in the image of God. In doing so, they provided the moral vocabulary for every subsequent civil-rights movement. Yet they might struggle to recognise some of the causes that now claim their legacy.

In many cases, the original moral logic has been stretched beyond coherence, with demands that seek not equal treatment but new entitlements that override the rights of others. This shift is encapsulated in the work of academic Ibram X. Kendi, who argues: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”. Such thinking abandons the universalism of the abolitionists and replaces it with a framework in which injustice is answered not by equality, but by new forms of exclusion.

Secular

The demand for non-denominational schools is often rooted in a desire for a clearer separation of church and state, for secularism. But secularism is not a self-sustaining moral system, it was shaped by the Christian worldview.  This may not be a fashionable claim, but it remains true. Whether one is atheist, Christian, agnostic, or of another faith entirely, the influence of Christianity on Western societies cannot be denied. Its tenets have shaped both individual and institutional attitudes towards human dignity, equality, and the belief that, just as there are facts about biology or physics, there are also facts about good and evil, justice, duty, and human flourishing.

In moments of danger or moral crisis, people instinctively reach for beliefs that steady and guide them”

It is understandable that some hesitate to acknowledge Christianity’s role in forming this moral framework, especially given the Church’s failures. Yet world affairs show plainly that different cultures generate different values; ours did not arise by accident.

In moments of danger or moral crisis, people instinctively reach for beliefs that steady and guide them. The saying ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’ does not imply that people suddenly acquire religious faith under pressure, but that when confronted with the effects of a disordered world, even non-believers recognise the enduring value of the moral framework that shaped Western civilisation.

Framework

Writer Paul Kingsnorth cautions against reducing Christianity to a purely utilitarian instrument for solving cultural problems. Its spiritual claims stand on their own. But acknowledging this does not prevent parents, of any or no faith, from recognising that schools shaped by a Christian ethos offer a reliable moral framework in an age of rapid ideological change.

Choosing such a school is not an attempt to cynically ‘use’ Christianity, but to preserve the school environment that best reflects their values. If that is what parents want, they must say so clearly in this survey by indicating that religious denominational schools remain their preferred choice.

Sandra Adams is a former Independent Seanad candidate NUI Panel. She is an advocate for women’s rights, child safeguarding, free speech and fact-based education.  

The survey is open until December 16 and can be accessed on https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-education/campaigns/primary-school-survey/