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God And The Bodgies

"All three political parties passed over in silence the question of religious education in public schools. It looks as though the Christian ideal of life is to be permitted to give way to a pagan culture exemplified in our youth by 'chicken', 'stove-pipes', and 'spring-knives'."

—("Salient," 13/3/58.)

"Religious teaching in some form or another is vital to the community . . . The leaching of religion is at the heart of all teaching."—Dr. Ian Cumming, Senior Lecturer in Education at Auckland University.

(Dominion, 14/3/58.)

Does the evidence support the contention that a religious upbringing makes children less prone to delinquency than a non-religious upbringing?

The sect most given to advertising the efficacy of its especial brand of religious education and of the family life it fosters, is the Church of Rome.

The last figures to be published in New Zealand indicating the incidence of crime among the adherents of various religions were issued by the then Chief Justice in 1914, when 41.74% of the inmates of New Zealand's jails were of the Roman Catholic persuasion, as compared with 14.07% of Roman Catholics in the total population. Much more recent figures in New South Wales (1946) show 38% of jail inmates as Roman Catholics at a time when the Roman Catholic proportion of the total population was 20%.

Facts like these are ignored by Christian apologists in their keenness to prescribe a Christian cure for delinquency. The 1954 Commission in fact overlooked ample evidence that a considerable amount of the Hutt Valley's adolescent naughtiness was the result of too much, not too little, religion in childhood.

Attitudes that go with religious instruction in childhood are often highly conducive to anti-social out-bursts in the teens. The concept that an action is good or bad because an arbitrary God has so ordained, without any relation to the social or personal effects of that action (completely ignoring a famous dictum of Christ's), is not likely to encourage respect in the questioning teenager. The rule of the strong right arm as exemplified in the religious sanctions of eternal reward or punishment, will inspire only the very meanest-motivated sort of good behaviour, if any at

Mrs. Margaret Knight, in her B.B.C. talks a few years ago, pointed to the alternative which exists for giving children a moral basis of a very much higher order without any religion at all. And, in fact, many English, American, and New Zealand homes have for generations been bringing children up in this atmosphere with a conspicuous lack of delinquent or aberrant results.

That influence of religion often encourages evil behaviour can be clearly illustrated from political history of not very distant date. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Metropolitan of Moscow give their blessing to the atomic armaments of their respective governments, just as the late Pope Pius XI blessed the Italian troops departing for the assassination of Abyssinia. To the great non-Christian populations of Asia and Africa, Christianity simply means the creed of the West, which, in turn, is synonomous with rapine and exploitation. Rev. Dr. Soper remarked that after the Suez assault "millions of brown, black, and yellow people . . . still anxious to give Christianity the benefit of the doubt, have now written it off as incorrigible.

Such acts as the excommunication of Tito for his persecution of Cardinal Stepinac (described in your last issue), have the same effect. To Western democrats, Tito has all the hallmarks of a totalitarian dictator, but to the Yugoslav peasants he was a liberator. The "New York Times" (15/10/46) noted that the contrast would not be overlooked between the Church's action in this case and the fact that "Although Adolf Hitler was a Catholic, he was not excommunicated for his persecution of religion."

The whole attitude of the Church towards Hitler opens it to the charge of compromise with the most horrible evil. The Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops at Fulda in August, 1936, issued an appeal for the cessation of strife between Church and State in Germany because "the danger from Bolshevism in many other countries demands peace, unity, and complete support of Hitler and the Nazi regime within Germany". This, at a time when the Nazis were labelling as "Bolshevist" such mildly liberal governments as those of Spain, Czechoslovakia, and others of their early victims.

The Christian political record is marred with countless such instances of positive evil. By contrast, Rev. Father Trevor Huddleston wrote recently ("New Statesman", 9/11/57): "It is a humiliating, chastening, but inescapable fact that Christian social ethics are today being proclaimed with far more vigour and effect by humanists, agnostics, and scientists than by Christian apologists."

Priestley, Russell, and Einstein have, from their standpoints as infidels of various kinds, taken a firm stand on the H-bomb in a line which accords with Christian ethics, where Church leaders (with the exception of some Roman Catholics and a few others) have conspicuously failed. And while Church leaders (with Rome certainly not excepted here) were busy appeasing Nazism, the task of defending everything merciful and aspiring in the European tradition fell largely to the humanists and agnostics of the liberal and socialist movements.

Is it a coincidence that Christian ethics are most actively rallied to by people who do not embrace Christianity as a religion?

Is it a coincidence that the juvenile crime wave is occurring side by side with a much-publicised "return to religion" highlighted by mass hypnotists like Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen?

These questions should be seriously pondered before we rush into acceptance of "religious education" as a panacea for the ills of our time.

—C.V.B.