Focus on values as churchgoers become scarcer and older

David Leask for The Scottish Herald

August 27 2007

Christians have never been scarcer - or older. There were fewer than 500,000 regular churchgoers in Scotland in 2005 and their average age was 47. In the last quarter of a century there has been a drop of nearly 70% in the number of children under 15 going to Sunday services. For the churches, the clear and unrelenting decline in Christian worship means we should have more religion in schools. For the secularists, it means we should have less.

Cue a debate, not just on how schools teach their only compulsory subject, RE, but on what, if any, prominence should be given to Christian values and doctrines in other classrooms. The Roman Catholic Church, now Scotland's biggest by attendance, believes the country's proposed new curriculum should stress the importance of common values such as compassion, mercy, integrity, tolerance and justice. Crucially, it also believes schools should stress the Christian origin of those values. It has produced a new school pack, Values for Life, which it hopes will spark a national conversation. Secularists are baffled by why values have to be Christian in an increasingly unchristian nation. Most of the values in the Catholic pack, they argue, long predate Christianity. The church, they say, has "no copyright" on goodness.

"Church attendance and religious belief for young people is very low and even Christian statisticians acknowledge that the precipitous decline of recent decades is set to continue," said Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society. "This explains the churches' anxiousness to increase their presence in schools, where pupils are a captive audience." John Haldane, professor of philosophy at St Andrew's University, welcomed the stress on values. "The conversation," he said, "is due and timely." Alternative versions of morality, he said, had failed to rival Christianity's "ennobling conception of the human condition".

[We should indeed be having a much more public and much more structured debate on morality in an increasingly Secular Europe. With the apparent terminal decline in religious observance in most European countries we need something to replace the ‘command morality’ so long imposed by the Church in its various incarnations. What that ‘something’ turns out to be will be up for a Secular society to decide. Let the debate begin.]