by Stephen Daisley, Spectator
Schools in Northern Ireland which teach pupils that Christianity is true are breaking the law. That is the ruling of the Supreme Court, which finds that religious education lessons and collective worship which aren’t ‘objective, critical and pluralistic’ are a form of ‘indoctrination’. It also finds that allowing parents to withdraw their children from these activities, which is already a statutory right, is not enough because doing so might place an ‘undue burden’ on parents or stigmatise the child.
The case involves a girl who, between 2017 and 2021, attended a ‘controlled’ school, a non-denominational institution overseen by a board of governors, funded by the Education Authority, and historically serving Northern Ireland’s Protestants. The girl’s parents are humanists and don’t wish their child, who is now 11, to be raised a Christian. While they profess to have no issue with religious education, they opposed their daughter being taught the tenets of Christianity as objective truths.
They want to teach her instead to be ‘caring, ethical and respectful of all people’. However, they decided not to withdraw her from religious lessons and worship because they feared she would be ‘bullied or isolated’, would interpret her exclusion as a punishment, and would be ‘outed, school year by school year, as a non-Christian’.