Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Christian nationalism in the US

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

The post Faith Watch, February 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Charles Freeman is a scholar of the ancient world, perhaps best known for his books Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (first edition 1996) and The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003). The latter argued that the rise of an enforced Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century shut down a millennia-long Greek tradition that prized open-mindedness, argument, and freethought.

I recently met with Freeman over Zoom, both of us appropriately sipping a glass of wine, to discuss his life and work. In particular, we discussed his new book The Children of Athena, which explores, through portraits of major thinkers from the historian Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) to the mathematician Hypatia (c. AD 355-415), how the Greek intellectual tradition continued to thrive under the Roman Empire until the coming of Christian orthodoxy. Below is an edited transcript along with some audio extracts from our conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: In various of your books, you make mention of your own engagement, throughout your life, with the classical world. So how did this lifelong fascination start?

Charles Freeman: Well, I was at one of the traditional public schools where they did more classics than anything else. We read Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus and the playwrights in the original Greek, so I got some idea of the real versatility and curiosity of the Greek mind, and I much preferred it to Latin. I found the Greek mind much more interesting. I loved the literature and the curiosity about the world that you see, for instance, in the Greek playwrights of the fifth century BC. So it always lingered in the back of my mind that the Greek mind was something special.

When I got a place at Cambridge, I was going to do history. But my father, who was ex-army and struggled as a farmer, said that we did not have much money. My great-great grandfather was a top classicist at Cambridge and one of my great uncles, who died very young, was also a top classicist, so there was a classical tradition in the family. But we were a slightly impoverished family with a very traditional English background, so my father said I was better off with a degree in law because that would make me some money.

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

I think that over the time that I studied law at Cambridge I actually read more history books than law books! I got very bored with the law. I mean, you really have to master the law, and you are not going to be able to change it unless you become prime minister! And I realized by the end of my time in Cambridge that I would never become a lawyer.

But as a present to me for deciding to do law, my father had arranged for me to go to Rome for six months, and I worked like a slave at the British School there. My first job was mending Etruscan pottery and then I was allowed to go out onto excavations and so on [more in the audio extract above]. I was keen on archaeology, but I realised that I was much too harum-scarum to ever be an archaeologist. I noticed that the good archaeologists always had their trenches absolutely neat and tidy, and my trenches were a bit of a muddle.

After I left Cambridge, I went out to teach in Sudan. I did not know what to do in life, like so many people after university, but I did work on one of the sites on the Nile during my Christmas holidays at the ancient site of Meroë. I had also dug at Knidos, which was a Greek city in what is now in Turkey.

So I kept all of this experience at the back of my mind, but then I became a normal history teacher and I ended up working with the International Baccalaureate, which was just beginning in the late 1970s. I worked for 10 years at a sixth-form college in Oxford. And so I was working with modern history.

I finally got a job as chief writer on a 12-volume world history, which enabled me to go back to my interest in the ancient world. The whole project eventually collapsed, but I was able to publish my sections on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as a single book for Oxford University Press. That gave me an academic basis from which to study the ancient world, and I have been working on that ever since, writing all kinds of books about it. In the early 2000s, I also began conducting my own tours of ancient sites, and I have kept that up, too.

How did you come to write ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’?

After I had written a book called The Greek Achievement in 1999, I decided that I wanted to write about the Greeks under the Roman Empire. I was fascinated by what actually happened to Greek philosophy when it came up against Christianity. And the end result of that was Closing, which made my name as a slightly alternative, freethinking author.

Your interest is in cultural and intellectual history, as opposed to kings and queens and battles. Why does that fascinate you so much?

I have always been interested in ideas and the way that ideas develop through history, and which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. This was embedded in me by my work with the International Baccalaureate, because there is a compulsory part of the curriculum called ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It is a course in critical thinking, with philosophical underpinnings, and I taught it for 10 years. I got very fascinated by it, and then I was asked to be an examiner, where we set questions based on the whole range of intellectual disciplines. I worked with brilliant minds from all over the world, and we came from all different kinds of disciplines, and I think that embedded the interest in ideas and critical thinking in my mind. I think that has enriched my approach to academic work, too.

That sounds rather similar to the ancient Greek tradition you have written so much about, with its commitment to open-ended enquiry and its great breadth.

Very much so. With my new book The Children of Athena, I have been able to explore all the different ways in which the Greek mind worked. Having had a very solid, traditional education, these Greek thinkers had a good foundation for very clear thinking, and for very diverse forms of thinking, which is really attractive to me.

Before we discuss your new book in more depth, can you talk a little about ‘Closing’ and your 2020 sequel of sorts, ‘The Awakening’ (published in the US as ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’)?

Closing was concerned with the openness of the Greek mind, its versatility and curiosity, not only through the classical period but through the great Hellenistic period when figures like Archimedes and Hipparchus were flourishing. There were two main strands of Greek philosophy, one inspired by Aristotle’s fascination with the natural world and one inspired by Plato’s focus on the immaterial world, which he saw as being the ultimate reality. I argued that Platonic thought was integrated within the Christian tradition while Aristotle was forgotten until he came back into the university in the medieval period.

And in ‘Closing’, you argue that this Greek intellectual tradition was stifled by the emergence, from the fourth century onwards, of an enforced Christian orthodoxy. Do you think some of your critics misconstrued this as rehashing the now unfashionable idea that antiquity was followed by an age of darkness and ignorance?

I think the title is a good title, but it comes across quite strongly, which might be a reason for that misunderstanding. In The Awakening, I made a point of addressing the very traditional debate between the view that the medieval period was one of innovation versus the idea that it was an age of darkness. I think I was quite fair. I was determined in The Awakening to give full chapters on the medieval university, medieval philosophy, and medieval science, to really explore those in depth, so that I was not vulnerable to critics who might say I was leaping straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and ignoring medieval achievements.

What do you make of historians like Tom Holland, who in his 2019 book ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’, argued that Christianity essentially made the modern world?

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state. And it has continued as such ever since! We still have 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and throughout history, they have always been forces for conservatism.

I wrote a book in 2009 called AD 381 because I saw that year as a turning point in European history. This was when Christianity became an authoritarian and conservative religion and when the revolutionary aspects you can find in the Gospels were abandoned. You can see a resurgence of those radical ideas in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the Quakers and other radical Christian sects during the English Civil War. You could also see that in early Christianity, but that tradition was destroyed in the fourth century.

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

I also do feel that I am very heavily criticised for this view, but Augustine had far too much influence. I am an Origen man. Origen, a theologian of the third century, was a sophisticated biblical scholar who thought Greek philosophy could be brought into Christianity. He also disbelieved in eternal punishment. And that is another problem I have with Holland’s book: he writes a very effusive defence of Origen but does not discuss Origen’s theology in great depth. And then later, he very briefly mentions that Origen was declared heretical when the Trinity was proclaimed in 381!

Surely Holland should have probed what heresy meant and discussed why one of the greatest Christian intellectuals was declared a heretic. I felt that Holland did not in any serious way probe into the many problems of Christianity. As it happens, I have been thinking of writing a book called Europe and Christianity: The History of a Troubled Relationship. That is quite a good title, I think. It would, among other things, look at the conflicts between medieval states and the papacy.

The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out. And Holland should have probed this more deeply. Why was Origen, one of Christianity’s best sales agents, declared heretical?

Holland might have it that Christianity was a great vehicle for universalism, in that it declared us all to be made in the image of God. But of course, as you say, there are the saved and the damned, which is almost the entire point of Christianity.

Yes, and so you have the problem of Calvinism and the predestination issue. Do you know whether you are saved or not? And then you have the problem with original sin.

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, said that he got more out of reading one page of Origen than he did reading ten pages of Augustine. I think that says a lot. Erasmus is one of my heroes. He is so broad-minded. And Martin Luther, when he heard of his death, said that Erasmus was going to hell! The Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books and there is still that very traditional Catholic argument that Erasmus caused the Reformation, which is, of course, not true. There were many other factors which made the Church vulnerable to a reformer who could articulate an alternative theology.

To go back to Holland, perhaps the main problem with his thesis is that he seems to believe that there is just one version of Christianity, and it is the version that happens to align with modern values and that everything else was just an aberration, not ‘true’ Christianity.

Yes. Christianity, for example, buttressed the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Nazis had a Christian church. And, as I said, there were radical Christianities, like the Quakers. So Christianity could be interpreted in every kind of political context.

That sounds similar to the problem with theology that you outline in ‘Closing’, namely that there is an endless proliferation of interpretations in Christianity because there is no rational foundation or agreed-upon set of first principles from which to build. That is why both the defenders and the opponents of slavery in the American South could claim, with equal justification, that God was on their side.

Michael Taylor has written a very good book calledThe Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which discusses the Christian, biblical sources used by the defenders of slavery. He stresses how much the Christian churches were in favour of slavery. Remember that it was the Pope who granted the Portuguese the right to enslave Africans back in the fifteenth century. So slavery starts off with a Catholic imprimatur, if you like. Of course, Protestants defended slavery too, even though we hear more about the Christian abolitionists these days.

Moving on to your new book, ‘The Children of Athena’, how does it relate to your previous work?

The book is about how the Greek mind was fertile and intellectually diverse for centuries under the Roman Empire. There was no dogmatism, no sacred canon, no absolutely authoritative texts, no non-negotiable doctrines. All that came in with Christianity. I think the intelligent reader will pick up that theme right at the end of the book, but I did not want to preach. I just wanted to show that the Greek mind was fertile right to the very end.

I have been criticised by some conservative Christians in the past, who say that the Greek mind was stagnant by this period, and that Christianity came along and saved it. So I am trying to argue, in Athena, against that view, without preaching, to show that the Greek mind was alive and well in the period up to the early fifth century.

In the book, you say that Plutarch (c.AD 46—after AD 119) is probably the most appealing of the thinkers you discuss. Why?

I would have loved to have had a landed estate next to Plutarch’s! I would like to have been able to wander over in the cool of the evening for a glass of wine with him. He is a wonderful mind, because he is not only a philosopher, but also a very good historian, and he is very penetrating on the individuals that he includes in his Parallel Lives. He is also a very good practical philosopher, on things like how to control anger and what values you should express in public life. He says that you must be humble and that you must sort out your personality before you enter public life, which is something that I think is still relevant today.

Here is a telling story. Plutarch was far from home when he heard of his young daughter’s death, and he wrote a very moving letter to his wife, a very humane letter, which should be much better known than it is. It shows what a sensitive individual he was, quite apart from being a philosopher and historian. He is my favourite of the figures I discuss in the book.

How did you choose which figures to include in the book?

They were all intellectuals. And the idea was to show the diversity of the figures that I covered. And I obviously had to choose individuals whose material was relatively extant, so that I could get a sense of how they thought and what they achieved. Strabo the geographer (c. 63 BC—c. AD 25) and Dioscorides the botanist (c. AD 40—c. 90), for instance, left behind a lot of material that still survives. And Galen (AD 129—216), of course, the top physician of his day, also left behind an enormous amount of work. The figures I discuss argued for their own place, really, because of what we know about them and the legacy they left behind, which I discuss in a chapter called ‘Afterlives’ at the end of the book.

You include a lot of information on the world these thinkers inhabited, particularly its physicality. How important was this to you?

I think quite important. Particularly for Athens, which I know well. I have been to Sagalassos [an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey], the city that I describe in one of the book’s interludes, two or three times, and it is a wonderful site that has been beautifully excavated by the University of Leuven. I also know Aphrodisias with its ancient Sebasteion temple, having visited it three or four times. I have also led tours around the Peloponnese and southwestern Turkey, so I have a good feel for the sites.

The Greeks were wonderful at choosing sites for settlement. Sites had to be close to fertile land and sources of water. The Romans put aqueducts up in many Greek cities, too, so the Greeks and Romans collaborated. In the book, I quote Strabo’s statement that the Greeks chose wonderful sites, while the Romans came and put in pavements and sewers and so on. Basically, all the dirty work!

One of your subjects is the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who is a great source for understanding the sites of the ancient world.

Yes. I think he’s increasingly respected now. He was considered rather pedantic once upon a time, but the more excavations go on, the more they actually find out that he was accurate and that therefore he should be relied on as a guide.

Another figure you discuss is Lucian of Samosata, the fearless second-century satirist whose anti-religious works led to him being mostly disregarded until the Renaissance. Tell us more about him.

An enormous amount of Lucian has survived because he has been very popular throughout the ages. Erasmus was a great fan of his, as were the Renaissance humanists in general, who were much more relaxed about using classical sources than had been the case previously. In the Renaissance, people like Boccaccio, who also admired Lucian, got away from the strict Catholic tradition of dismissing heretics and pagans. They were much more relaxed during the Renaissance.

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

Well, my editor particularly liked my chapter on Dioscorides, the botanist, because he had cures for all sorts of ailments.

Then there is Epictetus, the first and second century Stoic philosopher. My son is a psychologist who works in Los Angeles with the meditation app Headspace, and Epictetus could be read today as a guide to mindfulness. So I put my son on to Epictetus!

Ptolemy, the second century astronomer and mathematician, was brilliant. He had quite an extraordinary mind.

Galen, of course, is the top doctor. He understood nerves and pulses [see audio extract, left, for more]. He was well ahead of his time, but very arrogant. He certainly would not have been a nice chap to meet, but if you had an illness, he was the man to go to.

I quite enjoy Plotinus, the third century philosopher. He is quite difficult to understand, but he was certainly a prominent intellectual. His idea of the One influenced Augustine quite a lot.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.AD 150—c.215) wrote beautifully and had a more optimistic outlook on Christianity. Origen, of course, was a brilliant intellectual, and I am pleased to see that he is coming back into favour.

Themistius, the fourth century court orator, always survived. Whenever a new emperor came along, he would say, thank goodness we have you now, the last one was hopeless. And then that emperor died and he would say the same to the next one!

So I think all of the figures I write about have something to say for themselves.

One of the unfortunate things about people like Galen was that as Christian orthodoxy became more rigid, they were frozen into place as absolute authorities. That happened to Aristotle eventually, too. And the open-minded, questioning, empirical method of these thinkers was almost forgotten. Do you think that today, something similar is going on with the narrowing of public discourse? Can we learn from the Greek tradition once more?

Yes, I think it is true that people are very quickly pigeonholed. The breadth of intellectual thought has diminished. We are in a narrower world. I think part of it is that people do not have enough time to read. I come from a tradition where it is assumed that you read widely, and I am not sure people read as widely as they used to. Partly because they do not have the leisure to do so. But there has also been a narrowing of political discourse.

How do you deal with critics of your work?

I noticed with the reception of my book The Closing of the Western Mind that people were open to the arguments, and I do not mind critical reviews that are thoughtful and make good points when disagreeing with me, but I have had one or two reviewers who have not really grasped the ideas behind the book and so they were not able to criticise it effectively.

Is there less tolerance these days?

My wife and I were just talking about this. She asked me if I was able to talk freely during this interview, and I said that the things I talk about are not really difficult topics. But yes, we were discussing what you cannot talk about now.

A couple of quick-fire questions as we approach the end of this interview. First, Plato or Aristotle?

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I think I will see how The Children of Athena goes. I am beginning to run out of ideas, I think. I feel that I have done a good corpus of books, so we shall see. I am very happy with the range of books I have written. Even if I never wrote another book, I have completed a whole corpus of interlocking books which say what I wanted to say. But I always have ideas bubbling up in my head.

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A key element of secularism is opposing the age-old symbiosis between rulers (or governments) and state religion, each dependent on mutual legitimisation. King James I was under no illusion: ‘No bishop, no king.’ And as the American lawyer, writer, and orator Robert Green Ingersoll noted in 1881, ‘the throne and altar were twins – two vultures from the same egg.’

One of the most treacherous examples in the last century of this symbiosis was the way in which France’s Roman Catholic hierarchy propped up the Nazi puppet Maréchal Pétain during World War II.

I remind readers just how relatively recent this all is. For me it is not dusty academic history; as I will demonstrate, it is on the cusp of living memory. It is a case history of the fragility of liberty, something too many of our politicians – even those who claim to be historians – seem to be very careless about.

On 22 June 1940, Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler, conceding defeat. As a result, while the Nazis battled to overwhelm the northern half of the country, the southern half, euphemistically entitled ‘Free France’, was nominally under Pétain’s control, relieving Hitler of any need to deploy forces there. The Pétain regime was based in the spa town of Vichy, chosen for its many lavish hotels and transport links.

Pétain’s grip on power was tenuous and he needed all the support he could summon. Who better to fulfil this role than the Catholic Church, preaching to the nation from its pulpits each week? The purges against the Jews had already started, even in France, but that proved to be no impediment to the Church’s unconditionally supporting Pétain. And not just the French Church. In August 1941 Marshal Pétain enquired about the Vatican’s view of his collaborationist government’s anti-Jewish legislation. According to the report of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, top Vatican officials found ‘no objection to these restrictions so long as they were administered with justice and charity and did not restrict the prerogatives of the Church.’

The Church’s leaflet, addressed in 1942 to every French person, made just one point: that it was a religious obligation to support Pétain, almost as if he were a saint. He was already a national hero for his military role in World War I. The leaflet comprised sycophantic pro-Pétain statements from practically every senior cleric in the country. It is not hard to imagine devout matriarchs and other pious family members castigating detractors – for example, those in the resistance or protecting Jews – simply because anything short of unquestioning allegiance was portrayed as a sin against the diktat of the Church. In 1942, Bishop Lusaunier went as far as to direct that ‘the French should obey Pétain, not De Gaulle’ – who was leading the resistance from London.

It is not surprising that there is little or no evidence of a public backlash to the leaflet at that point. The Vichy regime was a police state, whose rules affected every single life. Even children had to sing a daily hymn to Pétain: Maréchal, nous voilà! (‘Marshal, here we come’).

The history of the Catholic Church is replete with its support for the oppressors over the oppressed, going back at least to the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores of South America in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the case of the Church’s collaboration with Pétain, its price for this Faustian pact was the reversal of laïcité, the secularist reforms of the opening years of the 20th century, from which the Church was still reeling. For example, France’s Third Republic had proscribed religious instruction or observance in publicly funded schools. On 9 July 1940, the Government of the Republic was transferred to Pétain’s control. Defeat was blamed on the Jews, Communists, atheists and Freemasons, and portrayed as divine retribution for the secularist reforms.

Religion was let back into publicly funded schools. Public funds were permitted to be used to finance religious schools. Pétain closed the teacher training establishments set up after the Revolution. From 1943, communes were required to pay for church maintenance. The Church was given back assets, particularly property, that had been sequestered by the Third Republic.

The Church will also have been delighted that the revolution’s battle cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was abandoned. Pétain replaced it with travail, famille, patrie (‘work, family, fatherland’). This ushered in a new moralism, an attempt to woo ardent Catholics, for example by discouraging divorce and demanding that women dressed modestly and bore children within wedlock. Jacques Duquesne, the author of a book on French Catholics during the occupation, believed that ‘one reason for the church’s mute acquiescence was its enthusiasm for Vichy’s moralizing, family-based, traditionalist agenda.’

Nothing in this regime actually operated as it was presented to the people. Although the cornerstone of the new regime was ostensibly Catholic, there were secularists among its ranks. And life in Vichy was as libertarian as it gets. Pétain’s private life was similar: he was not a practising Catholic, married a divorcée, and had affairs but no children.

A few months after the leaflet’s release, the Church’s position unravelled a little. In July 1942, Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, despite having supported Pétain, protested together with some other clerics, but no other prelates, about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and the reportedly enthusiastic arrest of over 13,000 Jews by the French police without any coercion by the Nazi authorities. By mid-1943, however, control of the notorious Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris, from which 67,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, came under Nazi control, demonstrating conclusively that the Vichy regime was subservient to the Third Reich.

Tellingly, Saliège’s protests did not shame the Church into rethinking its collaborations. As late as February 1944 the bishops condemned the resistance army, despite the fact that the extent of Nazi atrocities was widely known by then, as was their all but certain prospect of defeat in Europe. This was just six months before the allies liberated Paris, and, soon after, France.

After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, the Nazis deported Pétain against his will to Germany to head a ‘government’ in exile, but Pétain refused the role. In October, however, he was brought back to France for trial.

He played the wronged victim. ‘Power was legitimately given to me and this was recognised from the Vatican to the USSR.’ He was, if nothing else, a murderous anti-Semite. However the ‘Lion of Verdun’, as he had been known for his valour during World War I, saw himself as the country’s grieving father. On 17 June 1940, he had proclaimed, ‘France is a wounded child. I hold her in my arms.’ Five days later, as told by Martin Goldsmith in Alex’s Wake, he signed the Armistice with Hitler, at the latter’s request, ‘in the very same railroad car and on the very spot where, twenty-two years earlier, the Germans had surrendered at the end of World War I.’

Pétain may well have been motivated by an attempt to avoid France’s total destruction, and it is possible that he himself was the puppet of Prime Minister Laval. One of his main accusers was Paul Reynaud, briefly prime minister before Pétain took over, who had done his utmost to oppose the Nazis. Reynaud told the court, ‘never has one man done so much damage to a nation as Maréchal Pétain has done to the French.’

De Gaulle commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain was exiled to prison on l’Isle d’Yeu, where he died in 1951. Laval was executed.

Astonishingly, there was no wave of anticlericalism at liberation. The Church emerged unscathed from its collaboration with Vichy because the Gaullists, socialists, communists and the Christian Democrats were all united in a government that needed the support of the Church.

It was not until 1997, on the site of Drancy transit camp, that French bishops asked forgiveness ‘for the collective silence [sic] of the bishops of France during these terrible years.’

As the Guardian reported in 2002: ‘Successive French leaders have had their own reasons for perpetuating the illusion that the Vichy regime was a victim of the Nazis and not an active participant in a Germano-Franco fascism.  It was not until 1995, the year he became president, that Jacques Chirac broke the taboo of silence, admitting that “the French government had given support to the criminal madness of the occupiers”.’

Christian Eyschen, Secretary General of the secularist Federation Nationale de la Libre Pensée, cites numerous examples of Pétain’s concessions to the Church which have not been reversed, even now.

Unfortunately, my recent experiences of French justice lead me to go further. I have witnessed clerics not being held accountable under secular law for the sexual abuse of minors, nor for reporting their knowledge thereof as the law requires. In my opinion, the Church in France appears to be above the law, just as it was before the Revolution. The most spectacular example of this was the trial of the then most senior Catholic in France, Cardinal Barbarin (who had papal ambitions), for failing, as had been unlawful since 2000, to report abuse by a priest of numerous scouts over decades. Barbarin’s awareness of the abuse was not in contention, but the public prosecutor refused to initiate the case. Yet Barbarin was convicted after a private prosecution in 2019. In a bizarre development, however, the conviction was overturned by an appeals court, on the basis that Barbarin was not legally obliged to report the abuse allegations, because his victims were adults at the time when they alerted him. This decision was upheld on appeal by the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court for civil proceedings.

As to living memory, in 2019 I stayed at a family hotel on the south side of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) in the French spa town of Thonon les Bains in the department of Haute Savoie. It is famous for its maquisards, the guerrilla fighters opposing the Vichy regime, whose numbers included many Catholics. Some joined to avoid the ‘Compulsory Work Service’ (STO) that provided forced labour for Germany.

The patriarch of the hotel, a delightful man by then in his nineties, had been a maquisard. I shook his hand as he told me proudly of standing next to de Gaulle at the liberation of Paris.

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In 2017, after hearing years of evidence about the covering up of abuse in the Catholic church, the Commission proposed that priests should be legally required to report knowledge of child abuse to the statutory authorities. In particular, the Commission recommended that this reporting obligation should cover information obtained by a priest in the course of sacramental confession.

In the Catholic Church, the seal of the confessional places an absolute duty on priests not to disclose anything they hear from a penitent during the formal sacrament of penance. In church law, a priest who breaks that seal will automatically be excommunicated. So the mandatory reporting recommended by the Commission, and now being implemented in Australia, overrides what the Catholic Church regards as the inviolable seal of the confessional.  

This is necessary, the Commission concluded, because of the ways in which the confessional has been used to protect and facilitate the abuse of children. This is something evidenced not only in the Commission’s hearings but in other studies; see for example The Dark Box: A Secret History of the Confession by the Catholic writer John Cornwell. 

In the Archbishop’s view, however, this proposal amounted to an improper ‘attempt to renegotiate the church/state relationship’. Catholic priests, he maintained, would go to prison rather than comply with the law. When the Irish parliament legislated for mandatory reporting in 2012, with no confessional exemption, the Irish Catholic Church responded in a similar vein, advising priests to break the law.   

The controversy over the seal of the confessional in clerical sex abuse cases has become something of a flashpoint for competing views of the relationship between church and state, and of the extent to which the state is entitled to limit the freedom of religion to protect children from abuse.

Controversies about religious freedom have doubtless existed as long as religion itself. But the abuse scandals which have overwhelmed many religious groups raise the question of religious freedom in a new way. Churches have shown themselves to be poor at protecting children, often concealing scandals and prioritising the protection of their own reputations. Given that churches seem to be incapable of self-policing, how far should the state intervene in religious settings to protect children who may be at risk? How is any intervention to be balanced against the right to religious freedom? 

The fact that this is a relatively new controversy is not surprising. Child abuse has been happening in religious organisations for much longer than those organisations have admitted. But the exposure of abuse is much more recent. For instance, the worldwide clerical sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has only really been publicly visible since the 1980s. And the notion that children have rights to be protected against abuse is relatively recent too: the first child protection laws started to reach the statute book in the UK only in the late nineteenth century, and most date from the 1960s onwards. Certainly, the world’s monotheistic religions came into being hundreds if not thousands of years before anyone gave much thought to the rights of children.

In the debate about child protection versus religious freedom, the controversy over the seal of the confessional is just one source of friction; there are likely to be others. This became apparent in 2020, during hearings at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales (IICSA), which examined child protection in religious settings.

It was clear from those hearings that when it comes to safeguarding, children are at risk in many religious settings, but that these settings are also amongst the least regulated by the state. As one lawyer in IICSA observed, religious settings are ‘less regulated than donkey sanctuaries.’ State intervention to protect children might involve mandatory reporting, so that any instance of suspected abuse would be passed to the statutory authorities for investigation. It might also involve greater state oversight of religious bodies: inspection and regulation to ensure that child safeguarding rules are adhered to.

However, in order to regulate a setting, with the aim of protecting children within it, a regulatory body like Ofsted or a local authority has to know that such a setting exists. In practice, this could probably only be done through a registration requirement – with the law stipulating that any religious activity involving children must be registered with a regulatory body.

For the Evangelical Alliance, which represents thousands of evangelical Christian churches across the UK, such a registration system could be ‘deeply problematic’ because it could become a ‘de facto requirement to register with the state to practice one’s faith’ and therefore raise ‘human rights concerns’. So for some religious groups, even the idea that the state has a right to know who is engaging in organised worship, let alone take any action based on that knowledge, could be an intrusion too far. 

How should tensions between child safeguarding and religious freedom be negotiated?  Most countries have some type of legal framework which seeks to protect religious freedom but also recognises that it cannot be absolute, and can be limited to protect others. An overarching document in international law is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a multilateral treaty which came into force in 1976. Currently ratified by 173 states, it commits parties to respect the civil and political rights of individuals, including freedom of religion.

Article 18 of the ICCPR stipulates that ‘Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.’ 

The ICCPR, however, goes on to set out the circumstances in which religious freedom may be restricted: ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.’ Identical language appears in article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which also forms part of UK domestic law via the Human Rights Act. 

In the ICCPR formulation, therefore, religious freedom is not an absolute right: it can be abridged in specified circumstances and where ‘necessary’. It is indisputable that protecting public safety, order, health and morals will include protecting children from abuse. The issue then is whether any particular measure is ‘necessary’ in order to do so. In some circumstances this might involve asking whether children can be sufficiently protected without the measure, or whether another measure, less restrictive of religious freedom, could be used to secure the same end.

On the issue of the seal of the confessional, the Australian Royal Commission conducted its own balancing exercise. It concluded that ‘the importance of protecting children from child sexual abuse means that there should be no exemption from the failure to report offence for clergy in relation to information disclosed in or in connection with a religious confession.’ The Australian public, through their elected representatives, have endorsed that conclusion. This is unsurprising: the scale of the Catholic abuse scandal in Australia, with the Commission identifying over 4000 perpetrators, justifies a comprehensive, unconditional reporting requirement with no religious ‘get-out’ clause. 

Some countries also have their own legal provisions relevant to adjudicating these issues. The First Amendmenthttps://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/ to the United States Constitution begins with the words: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ The second part of that sentence, known as the ‘Free Exercise Clause’, seeks to keep government out of worship and the internal operations of religious institutions. On the face of it, the wording of the Free Exercise Clause appears to prohibit Congress from passing any law which could interfere with the free exercise of religion, even if such a law were necessary to protect children. 

But again, inevitably, free exercise must be a qualified right. In 1879, the US Supreme Court had to decide whether the Free Exercise Clause permitted Mormons to engage in the practice of polygamy, which had become unlawful in the US in 1862. The Court held, unanimously, that the Clause did not prevent Congress from prohibiting polygamy. The Chief Justice explained in his judgement that the Free Exercise Clause deprived Congress ‘of all legislative power over mere opinion’ but left the legislature free to prohibit activities which were ‘in violation of social duties or subversive of good order’. Although laws ‘cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinion, they may with practices’. To permit polygamy, the Chief Justice concluded, would be to ‘make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.’ So whilst religious belief could never be regulated, religious conduct could be. 

In fact, that interpretation of the Free Exercise clause – belief protected, but conduct not – was not entirely sustainable. The clause self evidently protects the ‘exercise’ of religion, not just the right to hold a belief. Religious freedom would be hollow if people were allowed to proclaim their belief, but prohibited from the physical activities associated with it, such as worshipping in a church, wearing religious garb, eating a restricted diet, or wearing a turban. 

In a 1990 case, the US Supreme Court decided that whilst the Free Exercise Clause protects both religious beliefs and the physical practices flowing from them, it does not allow a person to use a religious belief as a reason not to obey ‘a neutral law of general applicability’ – a law being ‘neutral’ when it is not motivated by an animus towards religion. Religious beliefs, in this formula, cannot excuse people from complying with laws of general applicability which, for example, forbid polygamy, prohibit child labour, compel payment of taxes and the like. Courts will strive to avoid interfering in the internal operations of religious institutions with respect to doctrine and worship but ‘free exercise’ cannot be used to evade duly enacted laws, especially where religious activity can harm others. 

With the growth of Christian nationalism in the USA, even this essentially reasonable formula has proved to be controversial with both American legislators and the more conservative Supreme Court of recent decades, which has tilted back to a more accommodationist approach to religious interests. But the basic proposition, that religion cannot be an excuse to evade laws designed to protect the public at large, is a useful conceptual starting point for analysing the balance between religious freedom and the protection of children from abuse. Applied to the confessional controversy, for example, it might suggest that the Catholic church should not enjoy exemptions from mandatory reporting laws which have not been permitted to secular organisations.   

The general issue of religious freedom and its limitations has been much picked over by the courts in many countries. Despite this, the specific conflict between religious freedom and protecting children from abuse is a relatively under-litigated area, probably because recognition of the possible conflict is so recent. The issue may come before the courts more often as governments respond to the welter of evidence about the abuse of children in religious settings.

From the IICSA hearings it is apparent that some religious groups are making a sustained effort to improve safeguarding, and recognise that the state has an important role to play inoversight and improving standards. But many other such groups, particularly the more fundamentalist ones, are unwilling to engage seriously in this debate at all.

In a free society, it is right to protect the freedom to worship, and it is right to be cautious about interfering with it. But given the overwhelming evidence that some religious settings have caused serious harm to children, it is also legitimate for the state to take measures to protect children in those settings. Refusal to countenance registration of religious bodies would deprive the state of any ability to perform a regulatory function. Yet many other organisations are registered and regulated for child safeguarding purposes: to demand exemption is to demand a privilege accorded to few other parts of civil society. To reject meaningful reform in this area is not a sensible or sustainable response. 

Archbishop Coleridge’s claim that governments are now seeking to intervene in religious life in new ways may be true – but misses the point. It is true simply because it is only in recent years that the full extent of clerical sex abuse has become visible. Interventions like mandatory reporting are warranted because children in many religious settings have been exposed to appalling abuse. The state has a duty to protect children. A hysterical rejection of action taken to do so using the pretext of religious freedom is surely unjustified and self-serving.

As I argued before IICSA in the hearings in 2020, ‘there are few rights and freedoms more important than the right of children to be free from sexual abuse.’ Rather than calling on their own priests to break the law – a law designed to provide the protection to children that the Catholic Church has itself been unable to provide – the Catholic hierarchy might do better to engage in a more considered discussion about how the right outcomes can be achieved. 

In any free society the balance between religious freedom and other priorities is quite rightly a subject for vigorous debate, but when the Catholic Church and other religious groups demand privileged treatment and exemption from ‘laws of general applicability’, governments should not hesitate to put children first. 

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A satisfactory apology?

The Church of Rome has finally started to face up to some of the historic abuses committed in its name. Earlier this month, a remarkable series of meetings was held between Canadian Indigenous leaders and Pope Francis I. The latter issued an apology, in Italian, for ‘the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church’ who had participated in the abuse of the Indigenous children caught up in the government’s coercive system of residential schools between 1883 and 1996. At least 150,000 children were forced to attend the schools, and more than 4,000 died.

The long-festering scandal of the schools took on increased prominence in May 2021, when the unmarked graves of 215 children were discovered by ground-scanning devices at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Several hundred more unmarked burial sites have since been detected at other former schools. The continuing shock of these discoveries has been such that, in the Canadian media, the five-day Rome meetings sometimes overshadowed even the war in Ukraine.

Not all those present at the meetings, however, and even fewer of those watching from Canada, were entirely satisfied with the Pope’s apology. By limiting its terms to only certain ‘members’ of his Church, the Pontiff has been perceived by some to be ducking responsibility for the failure of the institution as a whole to renounce the evils of its past.

‘His [the Pope’s] words may be what some want to hear, but there are no repercussions for what happened,’ said Gene Gottfriedson, a 58-year-old survivor of the Kamloops school and a former altar boy. ‘Forgiveness is not easy,’ wrote journalist Tanya Talaga, who is of Indigenous descent, in a response to the Pope’s apology in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. ‘Reconciliation does not stop here at the Vatican. And it will not end until we bring all our children home.’

The harm caused by the residential schools

In Indigenous tradition, harm done to an individual can extend through seven generations of their family. This has truly been the case of the school survivors. On top of the sexual and other physical abuse many suffered at the hands of their priest teachers, they were forbidden to speak their native language, were taught nothing of their tribal heritage, and emerged, in many cases, as rootless teenagers who went on to become parents without having learned any parenting skills. Associated harms include the alarmingly high rate of Indigenous prisoners in Canada’s jails: this is seven times that of other Canadians, accounting for 27 per cent of the inmate population while representing only 4.1 per cent of the Canadian population as a whole.

The so-called ‘education’ that residential school children received was heavy on Bible teaching, but proved useless in enabling its students to lead normal adult lives. After they finished school, most returned to the ‘reserves’ – inferior land set aside for Indian tribes in the 1800s – and subsisted on government welfare. They were forbidden by the Indian Act to own property, to borrow money to start businesses, or to leave the reserves without a pass issued by the local Indian agent, a government employee. (When South Africa established its apartheid system, it used Canada’s Indian reserves as a model.) Ironically, thousands of Indigenous families later became adherents of the Christian churches in which they had suffered abuse.

Truth, reconciliation and the Catholic Church

Today, the schools are viewed by most Canadians as a national disgrace and a stain on the country’s reputation as a tolerant, secular, liberal democracy. Two prime ministers, Steven Harper and Justin Trudeau, have previously apologised for them. The issue has occupied political and public centre stage since the signing of the Indian Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. The agreement, involving the government, Indigenous organisations, and the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches, led to the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard 6,500 witnesses and in 2015 issued a report containing 94 ‘calls to action.’

Every denomination has since met their obligations to provide reparations and assistance to surviving Indian school residents and their descendants – except the Catholic Church, which operated about 70 per cent of the 130 schools.

Under the Schools Settlement, most of the $4.7 billion (£2.9 billion) paid to survivors of the schools and their families came from the Canadian federal government. Together, churches and dioceses of the Catholic Church in Canada pledged $54 million in various cash donations to compensate survivors, plus an additional $25 million in services in kind. In the event, they fell seriously short in their promises – despite the fact that cash reserves, property and other valuables owned by the Church in Canada amount to billions of dollars, making it reportedly ‘Canada’s largest charity by far’.

Shamefully, the federal government let the Church off the hook to the tune of millions of dollars, because, according to government lawyers, there was little chance of recovering the funds through a lawsuit. However, in an apparent response to mounting pressure following the recent discoveries, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops last year announced plans for a second fundraising campaign for survivors of the schools; this is still in progress.

The residential schools and secularism in Canada

For all the furore over the visit to Rome and the Pope’s response, most commentators have overlooked the consideration that the harm done to Indigenous children would have been largely avoided if Canada had required a secular education to be provided in its Indian residential schools.

The residential school system was intended to be managed by the Catholic and Anglican churches. In 1879, just as it was being finally approved, George Jacob Holyoake, the British secularist and coiner of the term ‘secularism’, met with the Canadian prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, over lunch in Ottawa. While the record is silent on this issue, Holyoake would, one imagines, have cautioned Sir John on the adverse effects he had observed in England on schools that retained religious management of their classes and curriculum.

Any advice that Holyoake may have given ultimately fell on deaf ears. The schools, set up to ‘take the Indian out of the child,’ ignored every principle of secular education that had been provided by the public school systems since 1867, when Canada became a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire.

Canada’s failure to adequately anchor its laws and institutions in secularism has led to tragedy, persecution and indifference. It has harmed generations in the 160 years since Confederation and has delayed the development of a clear national identity. There are still a number of anti-secular legislative provisions in force in Canada, including the public funding of Catholic schools and tax exemptions for churches. While humanist and secular societies in Canada have campaigned to abolish such provisions, they have so far made little progress.

The Canadian Constitution Act, created in 1982 out of the old British North America Act, flies in the face of secularism in its declaration that Canada ‘is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God’. The Fathers of Confederation saw Canada as a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch, whether Queen Victoria in 1867 or Queen Elizabeth in 2022, would reign as both Head of State and ‘Defender of the Faith’ – the ‘faith’ being that of the Church of England.

Despite such legal provisions, many Canadians appear to go about lives that are largely secular. According to a recent study, ‘Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019’, the share of people who reported having a religious affiliation fell from 90 percent in 1985 to 68 percent in 2019. Those who attended a religious activity at least once a month dropped from 43 to 23 per cent. The jettisoning of religious affiliation and the growth of secular sentiment in Canada go a long way to explaining public indignation over the failure of the Catholic Church to atone for its mistreatment of Indigenous children.

The Pope is expected to visit three Canadian cities in July – Quebec City, Edmonton, and Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavit in northern Canada. According to CBC News, ‘the delegates who travelled to Rome expect Pope Francis to deliver a fulsome apology on Canadian soil for the church’s role in running residential schools.’

Demands that he recognise the Catholic Church’s institutional failures are likely to increase as the visit draws near. Will Francis show true contrition, and will he provide just compensation for the victims? As far as many Canadians are concerned, he has a long way to go – spiritually as well as geographically.

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