School prayer bans don’t make Britain a secular state
by Rakib Ehsan, CapX:
The ban on ‘prayer rituals’ at the high-performing Michaela Community School led by the so-called ‘strictest headmistress in Britain’ – Katharine Birbalsingh – is currently being decided on in the courts, with the ruling bound to have wider implications for religious accommodation in the English education system.
Birbalsingh has justified the ban on the grounds that the school does not have the physical structure and capacity to accommodate a prayer room (which would ultimately be created for more observant Muslim pupils), along with the fact that there have been instances where students have intimidated peers to coerce them into participating in religious activities. These are not only reasonable grounds for the ban – intimidation and harassment at a non-faith free school should be a matter for the police (however uncomfortable they may be intervening in so-called ‘community issues’).
Some have sought to frame the court case as a ‘trial’ between the British secular state and Islam. It is worth noting that Britain doesn’t technically have a secular state, considering that it has an established Church with the King as its Supreme Governor. This is further underlined by the existence of the Lords Spiritual – with 26 diocesan bishops and archbishops of the Church of England sitting in the unelected upper house of the UK Parliament.
While there has been a rapid process of ‘de-Christianisation’ in Britain over the course of the 21st Century, we are not a secular society (in fact, we are becoming a more religiously diverse one). Britain is not France, where laïcité – the constitutional principle of secularism – forms the basis for an uncompromising republican universalism (one which has experienced its fair share of struggles in terms of integrating Muslim communities). Contrary to the French Republic’s ‘colour-blind egalitarianism’ (which has bred a mainstream political reluctance to acknowledge very real forms of racial and religious discrimination), Britain is home to some of the strongest anti-discrimination protections in the world, with race and religious belief both enshrined as protected characteristics in existing equalities legislation.
Britain is a land of considerable religious freedoms – far more so than militant-secular France. It is no surprise that a recent study by CREST advisory found that three-quarters of British Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to live (with freedom to practise one’s religion provided as the primary reason). This freedom is extended to the point that there are Muslim free secondary schools (designated as faith schools) across Britain – in major cities such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester, the Berkshire town of Slough, and Lancastrian towns such as Blackburn, Bolton, and Preston.
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