While the idea of “Christian Britain” is largely imaginary for many, it remains entangled with the history of religious education. Such debates are now resurfacing amid a call from within the Church of England itself – by the Bishop of Oxford – to abandon the law requiring Christian worship in state schools.
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In the context of World War II, it somehow made sense to assert:
"It will be of little use to fight, as we are fighting today, for the preservation of Christian principles, if Christianity itself is to have no future, or at immense cost to safeguard religion against attack from without if we allow it by neglect to be from within."
It was oft-repeated rhetoric like this which fuelled the imagination of a “Christian Britain”, and enabled a direct link between the national cause in war, Christianity, and British identity. Soon afterwards the BBC began its long-running Religious Service for Schools, as well as a religious epilogue to its Children’s Hour. Ultimately, such rhetorical optimism led to the religious clauses of the 1944 Education Act, which included making collective worship in maintained schools the obligatory beginning to every school day.
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.... the sometime bishop of Bristol, Frederick Cockin, pointed out that though the 1944 Act had stipulated that religious worship should take place daily, it nowhere required that it be Christian. He went on, somewhat ruefully to say: “we shall do no service to the Christian position by trying to insist on a position of privilege”.
Even so, whatever form “worship” might take – and Cockin remained committed to its legal standing – he argued its value to the school community needed to provide the substance of the rationale for its place in the school day. Diverse perspectives of staff and students on religion also needed to be acknowledged and taken into account: Christian allegiance should not be assumed.
By the 1970s, it had become even clearer that educational reasons alone could provide justification for continuing with the practice of compulsory school worship. It seemed no longer justifiable to make a key aim of worship to foster Christian belief.
In 1975, John Hull pronounced school worship “dead” in its Christianising form, which Hull argued was “indoctrination”. Instead, in his book School Worship: an obituary, he proposed certain reforms, effective changes of tone and emphasis. These included that “assemblies” would encourage a reflective approach to living, demonstrate democratic values, and provide an objective experience of worship, without necessarily expecting children to give cognitive assent. In an increasingly multi-faith Britain, such proposals made pragmatic sense, winning widespread assent amongst educators, both Christian and not.
However, the liberalising trends represented by Hull’s intervention suffered at the hands of cultural conservatives embued in the politics of the Thatcher era who were concerned to preserve posited British Christian identity. The 1988 Education Reform Act can be read in this vein.
School worship has been made a feature of the totem that is the British identity and values debate. Fears of its erosion are implicated in a sense of loss of an imagined past. If Britain were ever Christian, it was not so in any straightforward and uncomplicated way, whether by measures of churchgoing, popular sentiment or demonstrations of civil religiosity.
