British Supreme Court declares that Northern Ireland religious education is a form of illegal indoctrination
In a landmark ruling, a judge at the Supreme Court in London has ruled against how religion is currently taught and practiced in Northern Ireland schools, a decision that will likely prompt a major shift in the curriculum. The matter relates to participants who the ruling describes as:
…a young girl, anonymised as JR87, and her father, anonymised as G…
They argued that the:
…Christian religious education given and collective worship provided in [the girl’s primary school] is contrary to religious freedom protections guaranteed by article 2 of protocol 1 (“A2P1”) to the European Convention on Human Rights…
The parents involved did not profess “any religious beliefs and they were not Christians”. Despite this, they found their daughter was displaying signs of religious indoctrination. In a 2019 letter, they informed the school that their daughter:
…now believes that God made the world, and she repeats and practices a prayer/grace that she was taught at school at snack-time.
The father G expressed concern:
…that his daughter is learning Christianity and not learning “about” Christianity in a school context that effectively assumes its absolute truth and which encourages her to do the same.
Northern Ireland religious education drafted by churches who see Christianity as “absolute truth”
This matches a 2022 Belfast High Court ruling on the matter which determined a failure to convey religious education “in an objective, critical and pluralist manner”, and that children were seeing the “inevitable consequences” of the four main churches creating the syllabus when:
All…seek to promote faith in Christianity as an absolute truth rather than knowledge about Christianity.
Justice Colton on that occasion ruled in favour of G and JR87, on the basis of the above and a view that the opt-out privilege afforded to the child was overly burdensome on the parents, and put the child at risk of being stigmatised.
However, at a Northern Ireland Court of Appeal hearing in 2024 Lord Justice Treacy ruled against the family, contending that:
The existence of [the right to op-out] does not sit easily with the allegation that the State is pursuing the aim of indoctrination. One asks rhetorically if that was the aim of the State why would it have legislated as it did by creating the very mechanism that could avoid the alleged objective?
In other words, if the state really wanted to indoctrinate you, why would it let you dodge it by withdrawing from religious education whenever you feel like it? Treacy did uphold the High Court’s ruling that the teaching on religion and collective worship were not objective, critical or pluralistic.
This latter point was key in the Supreme Court overturning the Court of Appeal’s verdict, as Lord Stephens’ judgement cites a case in Norway in which the concepts of objectivity, criticism and pluralism were considered alongside indoctrination as “simply different sides of the same coin”. That is to say – if you’re not conveying information in a properly balanced and complete way, you are by definition indoctrinating those you are teaching. Stephens also found various errors with how the Court of Appeal dealt with the question of opting out, including placing an undue burden on the parents to prove their concerns of stigmatisation for their daughter.
Unionist head-the-balls flip their lid at ruling
The fossils at the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) have predictably expressed their displeasure at the ruling. Calling them that may seem unkind, but given some of the cranks to have recently occupied their benches believe the world was created in 4000 BC, the reference to fossils will likely be lost on them anyway. MP for Upper Bann Carla Lockhart said:
Disappointing news today at the Supreme Court, but we remain steadfast. Christian teaching and values have long been part of school life in Northern Ireland, and we will continue working to ensure they are protected.
She is quoted by the Belfast Telegraph placing her faith in the man who has recently appeared more interested in acting as the stooge of a genocidal foreign state than doing his job as Minister for Education. She said of Paul Givan:
We are very fortunate in Northern Ireland to have an Education Minister who understands the importance of those Christian foundations and who is committed to safeguarding them within the framework of the law.
Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party, echoed Lockhart’s views, saying:
As someone who has consistently defended the role of Christian faith in our schools, I am deeply disturbed by the recent judgment on Religious Education. The language used — particularly the inflammatory term “indoctrination” is an affront not only to teachers and parents but to the Christian foundations upon which our education system has long rested.
I reject entirely the suggestion that Christian teaching in our schools amounts to indoctrination. That word has been weaponised to belittle the sincere Christian ethos that shaped our society, our laws and our moral compass. It is an insult to the thousands of teachers who faithfully and honourably deliver RE.
Lack of education on other faiths fuelling bigotry
This moral compass has apparently been so effective that it has encouraged the TUV and DUP to enthusiastically back a modern-day holocaust carried out by Zionists in Gaza. Therein lies a clue to the necessity of more pluralistic religious education in schools – it would be much harder to spread dehumanising myths about Muslims and other faiths if people were actually taught about these beliefs rather than being Clockwork Orange’d full of Christian dogma from infancy.
Declarations about being a “Christian country” are invariably paired with exclusivist sentiment designed to malign those of other religions or ethnicities, with a striking example at a recent far-right rally in Belfast. Racist God-botherers in Britain are holy-rolling their way to the promised land of an ethnostate at one crucifix-strewn shitshow after another.
At least some local politicians backed the ruling, with the Green Party NI saying:
Children don’t inherently hold a faith; they need space, time, and education to explore the world through science, reason, and diverse beliefs. The old “right to withdraw” is no longer enough. Northern Ireland’s schools must reflect our diverse society
Of course, not even science is presented as the “absolute truth” that Christianity is apparently being dispensed as in schools. Properly taught, findings in the likes of biology and physics are given as theories, ready to be usurped whenever a new set of propositions is borne out by stronger evidence. The fact that unsubstantiated faith is being presented as unambiguously correct serves to undermine the entire principle of instilling rational thought in learners generally, so the damage goes beyond the religious education classroom. Curriculum reform is urgently needed for the future of critical thought more broadly, though such a capacity is the key thing the likes of the DUP and TUV rely on voters not having.
Featured image via Unsplash/K. Mitch Hodge
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This is good news for children in Northern Ireland, provided that this decision is implemented by changing all religious schools to secular versions and ending all religious rituals imposed in every school. Every child deserves the right to education free from religious indoctrination. Then extend that right to the rest of the UK.
If I may, Airlane1979:
To expand by making explicit two relevant observations. One specific, one more general:
1. One generic aspect of the law pertinent to the wider context of this ruling is that of precedent.
To be clear, that the ruling made in this case is one of general principle rather than being limited to the specific case only. I will address that general principle below. However, it would seem reasonable to firstly provide an example of the concept of precedent in respect of a principle established under law being used in other cases to illustrate the point.
The example which comes to mind concerns a case I encountered back in the early 1990’s as a Union Branch Health and Safety Officer.
A fatal accident had occurred, arising from a fall from scaffolding on a brownfield site. The Health and Safety Executive prosecuted the company involved under Health and Safety legislation. The company successfully defended the case on the basis of a precedent set under a consumer protection case in which a supermarket chain had successfully defended a prosecution on the basis that it could show that the breach of consumer protection law (which, if I recall accurately, involved the sale of an out of date meat product) was not its fault.
The supermarket chain demonstrated that it had provided all necessary staff training, written instructions and other relevant written procedures and processes – including on site display at the counter – to meet its legal consumer protection responsibilities and that the breach was as a result of these written procedures and training not being properly followed by the counter staff they had employed.
Using this legal precedent, the company being prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive successfully argued, like the supermarket chain in the previous consumer protection case, that it had followed all safety procedures under the Health and Safety at work and other relevant legal Acts of Parliament in respect of site staff training, accreditation, written procedures, etc and that the fatal accident was the result of those procedures and training not being adhered to by employed staff.
I was informed at the time, by a local senior employee of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) that the legal counsel for the HSE even verbally and on court record agreed with the judge that the precedent set in the consumer protection case was applicable in this case. Offering no opposition on the point.
The relevance of precedent in this case is that the principle established by the UK Supreme Case Ruling, as reported in this Canary article, is that of the legal requirement to provide education and instruction to young people {Quote} “in an objective, critical and pluralist manner”, {Unquote]. As argued by those taking the case.
This is reinforced in the above article in the quote relating to the presentation of the curriculum being contested “as an absolute truth rather than knowledge about Christianity.”
The [legal] implied term in that quote being that, as laid out in the above article’s final paragraph of the undermining of the [quote] “entire principle of instilling rational thought in learners generally” [unquote].
To be more explicit, what this Canary article is explicitly critiquing in the coverage of this case is any emphasis on ‘narrative’ per se which rejects as old-fashioned, quaint and uncool all talk of an external reality independent of our thought processes but in principle accessible by empirical methods.
To be even more explicit, and this is where the concept of legal precedent and now established legal principle comes into play, the UK Supreme Court Ruling in this case is NOT limited to the issue of the subjective based teaching of Christian religion in places of education and learning. It is not even limited to extending the principle to the subjective based teaching of any other religion beyond Christianity.
Let’s join a few dots:
Just as organised groups and/or institutions/organisation based on and around religion (Christian or otherwise) are now bound by this ruling by the UK Supreme Court on the basis of the GENERIC PRINCIPLES established by the ruling, so is any other organised group and/or institution/organisation seeking to [quote] “indoctrinate” [unquote] young people in any LEARNING ENVIRONMENT on the basis of subjective beliefs religious or otherwise.
This means, in practical and legal terms, that, to take an example, any organised group and/or institution/organisation seeking to “indoctrinate” children in any learning environment with the subjective based beliefs of that organised group/institution/organisation as representative of absolute truth can be legally challenged as a result of this ruling and the general principles upon which the ruling is based.
One prime example being the post-modernist based subjective [i.e. non-objective and non-rational/non-empirical and un-evidenced based narratives] doctrines around, say, self-id.
The point being that this ruling has practical and legal implications beyond the teaching of Christian (or other) religion in LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS involving young people.
2. The more general observation is that it seems reasonable to surmise that the absence of joined up thinking [what EM Forster referred to as “Only Connect”] absent in this article – as detailed in point 1, above – represents yet a further example, among an exponentially growing number encountered daily, of a culture of reductionism which is systemically endemic across not just the UK but also the throughout a Collective West that is so atomised and individualised that the ability to join dots and think systemically across the populace at all levels is so low that it will be totally absent within a decade at most.
The Collective West does not do organisation or systems thinking any more. Which is why these people are freaking out about what has been obvious to a blind man on a galloping horse for the several decades:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCUnlPJRGY4