“Do you get it now, Prime Minister?”
In his leading article in the 19 December issue of the New Statesman, which he has guest-edited, the evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins launches a scathing attack on David Cameron and his government’s imposition of religious tradition on society in the form of faith schools.
Dawkins’s open letter, addressed to the Prime Minister, leads with a warning that we must not be distracted “from the real domination of our culture and politics that religion gets away with in (tax-free) spades”; indeed, these religious traditions are “enforced by government edict”.
In a direct rebuke to David Cameron’s “government, [which,] like its predecessors, does force religion on our society, in ways whose very familiarity disarms us”, Dawkins lists examples, from bishops in the House of Lords and the fast-tracking of “faith-based charities to tax-free status” to the “most obvious and serious” case of government-imposed religion: faith schools.
“Faith schools don’t so much teach about religion as indoctrinate in the particular religion that runs the school,” Dawkins writes. Telling a child that he or she belongs to one particular faith “pav[es] the way . . . for a lifetime of discrimination and prejudice”.
Returning to a question he posed to Cameron in the Guardian last month – Why do you support faith schools? – Dawkins writes:
I satirised the faith-labelling of children using an analogy that almost everybody gets as soon as he hears it: we wouldn’t dream of labelling a child a “Keynesian child” simply because her parents were Keynesian economists. Mr Cameron, you replied to that serious and sincere point [with] a contemptuous snigger: “Comparing John Maynard Keynes to Jesus Christ shows, in my view, why Richard Dawkins just doesn’t get it.” Do you get it now, Prime Minister? Obviously I was not comparing Keynes with Jesus. I could just as well have used “monetarist child” or “fascist child” or “postmodernist child” or “Europhile child”.
Nor is Dawkins convinced by the Prime Minister’s “contemptuous snigger” and his claims about misunderstanding: “I think you got it all along. If you are like several government ministers (of all three parties) to whom I have spoken, you are not really a religious believer yourself. Several ministers and ex-ministers of education whom I have met, both Conservative and Labour, don’t believe in God but, to quote the philosopher Daniel Dennett, they do ‘believe in belief’.”
Dawkins adds: “A depressingly large number of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow ‘good’ for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for the common people even if we chaps don’t need it. Condescending? Patronising? Yes, but isn’t that largely what lies behind successive governments’ enthusiasm for faith schools?”
Furthermore, the enforcement of religion in society through politics is not democratic: “Baroness Warsi, your Minister Without Portfolio (and without election), has been at pains to inform us that this coalition government does indeed ‘do God’.” Yet British citizens who elected these ministers “mostly do not”.
Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I do not mean state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state.
In the leader, Dawkins also makes a point of wishing Cameron a “Merry Christmas”. “All that ‘Happy Holiday Season’ stuff, with ‘holiday’ cards and ‘holiday’ presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists,” he writes.
As a “cultural Anglican”, he writes, “I recoil from secular carols such as ‘White Christmas’, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and the loathsome ‘Jingle Bells’, but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James Version, of course.”
This special Christmas issue follows the much-discussed New Statesman guest edit by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in June this year.
The issue, cover-dated 19 December, will go on sale in London on Tuesday 13 December and in the rest of the country from Wednesday 14 December. British and international readers can pre-order single-issue copies through our website from 1pm on Monday 12 December. If you have any purchasing queries, please email Stephen Brasher
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