2013-05-21T15:59:16-04:00 Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=andrew-copson Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Andrew Copson Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3226022 2013-05-07T19:00:00-04:00 2013-05-07T12:32:21-04:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/ Anglican church attendance figures for 2011 published this week pose a serious challenge for any church defending its position as the national, established, top religious organisation.

The figures showed that, although decline has slowed slightly, 98% of people in England didn't go to a Church of England on an average Sunday. Only 5% went at Christmas - a time when large numbers of non-religious "cultural" Christians can be expected to go along, dragged by relatives or just to feel a nostalgic Christingle. The Church of England married only a minority of couples, and conducted the funerals of only a minority of the dead. (66% didn't have an Anglican funeral which, given that the older demographic is a last bastion of Anglicanism is, on its own, a revealing fact.)

In terms of raw numbers, the Church of England only just stayed ahead of the Roman Catholic Church in England in terms of worshippers and - although numbers are more difficult to determine - the average number of people attending mosques on a weekly basis was not that much lower.

Attendance figures are of course only one part of the picture but in terms of belief and identity the non-religious nature of our population is similarly clear. The British Social Attitudes Survey has shown that most people don't have a religious identity, and 80% don't have an Anglican one and religious beliefs such as in Jesus or the God of the Christian Bible constitute a minority view.

These figures shouldn't be cited in any sort of demographic one-upmanship and it is no doubt the case that they represent important services given by the Church of England to its members. In an ideal world, that could be the end of it. Good for the Church of England we might say, still struggling on, albeit as a minority concern, giving good services to those who want them.

But the Church of England is not just an NGO or voluntary association like any other. It is part of our state. It is an established church with constitutional power and privilege and its members have privileges and rights in law and policy that their fellow citizens in the majority don't have.

In 2011 the Church of England may only have had 2% of the population worshipping each Sunday, but it controlled nearly 30% of our state schools - totally funded by public funds - containing just under a million children. In many of those schools it had the privilege of controlling admissions and the curriculum, in all of them it had the privilege of controlling employment. Although a minority religion which only 20% of people identify with, its representatives continued to have the 100% unique privilege of automatic seats in our Parliament and it received almost monopoly public funding for its mission in state funded social institutions like our prisons and hospitals.

This week's figures help illustrate the disparity between the Church of England's legal position and the social reality of England today. By throwing it into such sharp relief, they may help to bring the more just secular constitutional settlement that our diverse and increasingly non-religious society needs.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2276099 2012-12-11T07:08:14-05:00 2013-02-10T05:12:02-05:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/
Of course, the real figure of people who are actually religious in any meaningful sense that the man or woman on the street would use the word is even lower. We know from research done since the last census that most people who tick 'Christian' do so for cultural or ethnic reasons rather than religious ones and only 48% of those who tick 'Christian' believe that Jesus Christ was real person who was the son of god and rose from the dead. Even fewer go to any sort of religious service - in fact about 90% of the population does not attend a place of worship on an average week. It was one of the aims of the British Humanist Association's Census Campaign last year to encourage such nominal but not actual 'Christians' to tick 'No religion' in 2011.

In spite of this, for ten years Christian lobby groups and activists have made extensive use of the 72% Christian result of 2001 to argue for more influence in public life, more state-funded faith schools and greater privilege for religion. Now that the new results show that the proportion of 'Christians' - even in census terms - has gone down, we might hope that the special pleading the last results engendered will not be repeated. I imagine, however, that it will: the same lobbyists will point to the fact that the 'Christian' population still represents a majority and they will probably - as they have done before - attempt to claim for themselves some of the non-religious population as well, saying they are culturally Christian or have some belief in god notwithstanding their 'non-religious' identity.

The big cultural change reflected in the census results should give lawmakers and government good reason to resist this sort of Christian rhetoric. What is needed in a society that is increasingly diverse and increasingly non-religious is a secular approach to law and policy which does not favour or disadvantage anyone because of their religion or beliefs. Whether it is the policy of increasing the number of state-funded 'faith' schools, the contracting out of public services to discriminatory religious groups, keeping automatic places for Church of England Bishops in the House of Lords, or defending the continued legal requirement for all pupils in state schools in England and Wales to take part in a daily act of 'broadly Christian worship', there is much that government could be encouraged to re-think in light of today's results - and should be.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2098758 2012-11-09T04:11:29-05:00 2013-01-08T05:12:01-05:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/ a Guardian blog last week, criticised the British Humanist Association (BHA) for promoting humanism as an essentially negative approach to life defined by what it isn't and for being on an incoherent and self-defeating mission to eliminate all social bonds, based on an outmoded view of religion.

The blog set up humanism as a recent approach to life, grounded in an antagonism to Christianity. This is a narrow view. It is true that the word 'humanism' only began to be used in English in its contemporary sense about 150 years ago, but the philosophy it denotes and which the BHA promotes (although it is exceptionally well-suited to the modern world we live in) is not an entirely modern phenomenon. Throughout recorded history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and compassion. They have trusted to the scientific method, evidence, and reason to discover truths about the universe and placed human welfare and happiness at the centre of their ethic. It is these views in combination that constitute humanism - a naturalistic and morally aware approach to living in the here and now. No parasite on Christianity, it is in fact a stance from which, historically, Christianity borrowed much of its practical ethics. You can find millions of men and women with humanist views in Britain today and you can find their equivalents among the materialists of classical India, the Confucians of ancient China, the partisans of the European enlightenment, their distant forebears in the Mediterranean world of the Romans and Greeks, and the free minds of the short-lived Arab renaissance at the time of the European dark age - as well as among the uncounted men and women who have left no record or whose existence has been struck from history by institutions opposed to their values.

Much of the BHA's work - like providing resources to schools or providing many thousands of non-religious funerals and other ceremonies [links to: http://www.humanism.org.uk/ceremonies] every year - is focussed on providing support to people in Britain with humanist views today. This is all in addition to what attracts most media attention: our work to campaign for a secular state, challenge religious privilege, and promote equal treatment in law and policy of everyone regardless of religion or belief.

Brown's blog saw these campaigns as 'mopping up operations for a battle that has been strategically long won'. This is a strange view, as much of the religious discrimination and anti-secular activity that the BHA challenges is not just residual (like Bishops in our parliament) but new. There are more state-funded religious schools now than in previous decades: they continue to grow in number and as a proportion of our state schools overall. It is against the unfair powers of such schools to discriminate on religious grounds in their admissions, employment and curriculum - powers recently extended, not diminished - that one of the main campaigns of the BHA is directed. Also novel is the strategic repositioning of organised religion in the UK as a provider of social welfare, with services previously provided by the state being contracted out to religious groups that do not lose powers to discriminate even when they receive this public money to provide public services. This is a new and aggressive attempt to roll back the secularist advances of previous decades and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the exceptionalism some religious campaigners are seeking represents one of the most significant current challenges to the principle of the rule of law. I agree that the Christian theocratic view that Brown's blog mentions is eccentric, but I don't see that it is universally seen as quaint and it is not without its advocates at high political levels. To campaign against it is not to campaign against religion but against religious privilege, and the unfairness of a state that is still considerably less than secular - and it is campaigning that is much-needed.

Humanism itself is a self-sufficient worldview founded on the positive principles of reason, worldliness, sympathy and humanitarian conviction and the campaigns of humanist organisations are invariably based on the positive values of human rights, respect for the dignity of each person, and equality before the law. The slanders that humanism is negative and the campaigns of humanist organisations irrelevant or wrong-headed are just that.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1841187 2012-08-29T17:50:02-04:00 2012-10-29T05:12:04-04:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/
In the debate, though, there has been a general absence of supporters from public life for his position; those who have not opposed assisted dying entirely have nonetheless restricted themselves to advocating the legalisation of assisted dying only for people who are terminally ill.

The case of Tony Nicklinson, unbearably suffering from an incurable condition that prevented him from taking his own life but not terminally ill, went further and it was further than some campaigners said they were willing to go. Because of that, it is worth rehearsing the strong moral case for us, as a society, to provide exactly what Tony Nicklinson wanted to be provided.

Firstly: a mentally competent adult should be afforded control over his or her own body. Only our thoughts are perhaps more personal and more wholly owned by us than our bodies and the right to bodily integrity and autonomy of each person is the most important guarantee we have of individual dignity.

Secondly: some people - through disability - are unable to give effect to their own desires. This can create great suffering for them.

Thirdly: compassion should motivate us to alleviate suffering and we should be moved to help those who cannot help themselves. If a person is not capable of fulfilling their own legal desires and there are others willing to assist them in fulfilling their wishes, there is no obvious reason why the law should criminalise the helper.

Fourthly: the intentional ending of one's own life is legal and, more than that, is an act that a rational and mentally competent person may well consider - in extreme circumstances - to be preferable to continued life.

Respect for the autonomy of a free individual, however disabled, combined with the principle of compassion, undeniably indicates that society should provide assistance to those in Tony's position.

In 2011 I was called to give evidence to Lord Falconer's Commission on Assisted Dying and I made this case. In the end, the Commission came out only for assisted dying for the terminally ill. This was a great shame because, ultimately, support for assisted dying for terminally ill people but not people like Tony Nicklinson is a vote for more human suffering, not only on a social scale but at the individual level. After all, someone like Tony Nicklinson might have to suffer decades of torment compared with the briefer suffering of a terminally ill person who the Commission would be happy to see assisted to die.

Recognition of the inhumanity of this has recently come in British Columbia, where the Supreme Court has ruled that Canada's laws against assisted suicide are unconstitutional, because they discriminate against physically disabled patients (who, unlike other people, cannot take their own lives). The court has given Canada's federal parliament one year to legislate on the matter while, in the meantime, giving Gloria Taylor (seriously ill with Lou Gehrig's disease) permission to seek doctor-assisted suicide during that period.

It is right for us to act compassionately to alleviate suffering, just as we would hope that our suffering would be alleviated; and it is right that we respect the choices of the person who we wish to help, just as we would wish our own choice (whether to live or die) to be respected. The only really difficult ethical question surrounding assisted suicide is how we can ensure that an individual's desire to end their life is the genuine, settled, free choice of a mentally competent individual. Of course, therefore, there must be safeguards in any future regulation of assisted dying. But as long as stringent safeguards are put in place, it is difficult to see the ethical case against it being provided at all.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1646517 2012-07-03T17:20:48-04:00 2012-09-02T05:12:16-04:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/
Reform of Section 5 is long overdue. It has resulted in some well-known absurd arrests and prosecutions, such as a fine issued to a man who growled and said 'woof' to two Labrador dogs. It has been used in a way which has worrying implications for freedom of speech: in 2008 a 16-year-old boy was detained for holding a placard which described Scientology as a 'dangerous cult', and an atheist pensioner in Lincolnshire was recently warned by the police for displaying a poster in his window which stated that 'religions are fairy stories for adults'.

It is the clause of Section 5 which outlaws 'insulting words or behaviour' in a way which is likely to cause 'harassment, alarm or distress', which has enabled cases like these to take place, and which has a chilling effect on freedom of speech. The word 'insulting' is vague and wide-ranging : an opinion which one person considers to be valid criticism could be regarded by someone else as an insult, and any opinion which is unpopular or unusual is likely to cause 'offence' or 'insult' to someone. Another oppressive feature of this law is that the police and the courts reserve the right to decide whether your actions constitute 'insulting behaviour': you could be convicted on the say-so of a police officer of judge, regardless of whether anyone has actually been insulted by your actions.

The issue of maintaining freedom of speech in the face of accusations of 'insult' is one which atheists, humanists and secularists are familiar with. Members of religious groups often demand that legitimate debate about their beliefs should be shut down in order to avoid causing 'offence'. However, many religious groups are also opposed to Section 5, on the grounds that it could stop them from expressing their own controversial opinions. For example, some religious groups have bigoted views on homosexuality. While these views are certainly unpleasant, finding your opponent's views distasteful is not a valid justification for banning them, or for cracking down on those who express them. To uphold freedom of speech for everyone, atheist and religious, Section 5 must be reformed now.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1589414 2012-06-12T09:31:01-04:00 2012-08-12T05:12:06-04:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/
...does it mean that removal of the Bishops from the House of Lords (the last thing we were told would mean disestablishment) wouldn't actually mean disestablishment and we can go ahead with removing them?

...how long after the introduction of equal civil marriage does the Church intend to hand over its schools?

...how long after the introduction of equal civil marriage does the Church intend to remove its state-funded chaplains from prisons, hospitals and the armed forces?

...why don't they already consider themselves disestablished by virtue of the fact that most marriages already aren't conducted by them anyway but are civil marriages?

Or is this just is a devious, desperate attempt by shamelessly self-interested moral authoritarians to impose their own limited and unshared view of human relationships on everyone else by threats, scare-mongering and hyperbolic raising of the stakes to distract from the fact that this debate isn't - or shouldn't be - about them but about the civil right of two people in love to have their relationship recognised by their friends and family and the law in the country where they live?

You decide!]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1450642 2012-04-24T19:23:57-04:00 2012-06-24T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/
They will be reduced in number from 26 to 12, but since the total number of appointed members of the chamber will also decrease, this will actually increase the proportion of Bishops relative to other appointed members. While they currently make up about 3% of the appointed House, they would make up anything between 12% and 17% of the appointed part of the reformed House.

Only 35% of the committee members voting opposed special reserved places for Bishops, with 65% of them in favour: proportions which are almost the diametric opposite of public opinion. 71% of public respondents to the 2002 consultation on Lords reform wanted Bishops removed; 60% of people in a YouGov survey this year wanted them out; an Ekklesia poll found that 74% of people opposed the automatic right of Anglican bishops to sit in the House of Lords, with only 21% thinking it right.

The total unrepresentativeness of the committee and the government's position is the reason for the launch of the 'Holy Redundant' campaign today, which is encouraging the public to let their MPs know of their opposition to automatic places reserved for Bishops in our Parliament.

No sound arguments were given in the report of the committee as having been considered to lead to the conclusion that Bishops should remain. Boiled down, what argument that does appear seems to be that Bishops should stay because they want to and some people of other religions want them to stay as well.

The only explanation we're left with is that the Church is a powerful vested interest, supported by powerful vested interests - just the kind you'd think that reform designed to make parliament more democratic and accountable might take on - but the kind that often triumphs, and has done so again. It is now up to those MPs and peers who do care about a fair reform of the Lords to take them in in the debates which the Bill will now proceed to have.

It is difficult to think of what arguments could possibly be made against the fair-minded parliamentarians to whom this cause now falls. The argument of tradition - that we should have Bishops because we have had them for a long time and it's best to leave things as they are - is nonsensical at a time of reform. The argument that Bishops bring unique ethical expertise is insulting to all those peers and MPs who aren't Anglican Bishops (whose ethical views may not even be that representative of Christians anyway when you consider that 70% of Christians support assisted dying for the terminally ill and 100% of Bishops in Parliament voted against it). The argument that removing them would amount to disestablishment of the church is rejected by legal experts.

More importantly, no argument that Bishops have a contribution to make to Parliament is a sufficient case for their having special reserved places in Parliament - why can't take their places through open election or appointment like anyone else? A route into the national parliament of a free and open country which is available to individuals solely by virtue of their religion, their gender and their position in the hierarchy of one particular denomination of one particular Church is a unworthy route for a modern democracy in a plural society.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1281254 2012-02-16T06:47:33-05:00 2012-04-17T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Copson http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-copson/
But it is not overweening secularism that is the UK's problem - it is continuing and entrenched privilege for Christianity and Christian churches, and the consequent efforts by other religious groups for privileges of their own.

It was especially surreal of the Baroness to accuse secularism of being 'intolerant' and 'illiberal'. It is not secular schools in England that are allowed by law to discriminate against children on the basis of their parents' religious beliefs: it's the thousands of state-funded Christian schools and the handful of those run by other religions. It is not secular agencies that reserve employment opportunities for staff according to their beliefs, but the many Christian and other religious agencies who are increasingly having public services contracted to them by the state. It is not non-religious organisations which lobby for and have received special exemptions from laws - like equality laws - that should affect everyone equally. It's not the British Humanist Association that has unelected representatives as of right in our national legislature - it's the 26 bishops of the Church of England who are there.

These and many many other examples of religious privilege and continued official discrimination on grounds of religion or belief give the lie to Lady Warsi's oft-repeated smears.
by would be good if we could dismiss her as just a minority of one but - at least in her views on this issue - she is far from isolated. Eric Pickles just last week jumped into the row about local councils not being able to include prayer on their formal agendas with the same anti-secularist gusto he has displayed on previous occasions. At the end of last year, David Cameron made his own extraordinary speech on Britain's status as a Christian country, a speech which provoked more astonished bemusement than outrage, with its self-evidently ahistorical and bizarre statements, and its improbable calls on us all to be confident in our Christian nature.

When they are so palpably out of kilter with reality, why do present day politicians keep saying these things?

The most hopeful political reading is that they don't really mean it and are just attempting to pacify the small but increasingly strident minority of Christian lobby groups who are seeking yet great influence in our public life and greater privilege for those with Christian beliefs. It would be a shame that politicians had bought into the crazy narrative of 'christianophobia' that these lobby groups promote, but at least we could rest assured that it would just be political rhetoric and no practical harm would come of it.

More alarming is if Warsi, Pickles and Cameron are serious in their message. A government that tried to make Christianity and Christian beliefs the foundation of British values or a social morality would be building on seriously unstable and unshared foundations. Secularism is essentially a political strategy that says, in the context of a diverse society, the state should not discriminate in favour of or against any person because of their religious or non-religious beliefs. For a government to set itself against that principle is concerning, and the expansion of state-funded religious schools, contracting out of public services to religious groups, and official guarantees of Christian privilege in public life give increasing plausibility to this second interpretation of the politicians' words.

If the latter interpretation is the correct one, then politicians should remember that their approach is far from popular. In a 2006 IpsosMori poll, 'religious groups and leaders' actually topped the list of domestic groups that people said had too much influence on government. In the research released yesterday by the Richard Dawkins foundation, over 90% of self-described Christians said they did not think religion should have special place in public policy. A majority of the public surveyed - including a majority of Christians - repeatedly say they are against new religious schools. Policies that pursue religious exceptionalism in defiance of demographic reality and public opinion can only cause division and dissent.]]>