By Angelos Sofocleous and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Religious Education (RE) classes in Europe can spark controversies in a number of ways. One is the endorsement of a particular religion or life philosophy in the process of teaching the materials to a diverse student body coming from a variety of different faiths and cultures. Another can be the outing of students’ individual faith or parents’/household faith of the student in the context of discrimination or prejudice within the larger culture or in the school for children of other faiths.

A further controversy may occur with the standard educational reason for insufficient teaching of the RE curriculum for various reasons, akin to skimming over evolutionary biology because of the legitimate fear of backlash from religious-creationist parents. A more obscure one, but not necessarily uncommon, can happen when the education minister and theologians come into conflict with one another. In Greece, recently, the controversy centred on the need for parents to submit a Solemn Declaration for their children to opt-out of the RE class.

The National Secular Society reported on a recent case in some depth. The NSS stated that five Greek students and parents brought forth a case to challenge the requirement of a solemn declaration for opting out of RE classes. They would be required to stipulate that they – the students – were not Orthodox Christians in the request for opting out of the RE class. This can carry social risks with 81-90% of the population self-identifying as Greek Orthodox Christian.

The students, if required to stipulate their faith tradition differing from the Greek Orthodox Church, may be exposed to intrusion and coercion from the school authorities and their classmates. In addition to this, the exemption viewed individual belief structures as bound to belief groups and, therefore, neglected the rights of individuals in the light of the freedom of religion and freedom of belief. Both amount to sovereign individual rights, not collective rights seen in the assumption of belief groups as homogeneous as if one mind.

More importantly, making it necessary for students to reveal their religious beliefs in order to receive an exemption from Religious Education classes is unconstitutional. In a unanimous ruling, on Thursday the 31st of October, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Europe’s top human rights court, ruled that Greek authorities do not have the right to oblige students to reveal their religious beliefs for any reason. “The authorities did not have the right to intervene in the sphere of individual conscience, to ascertain individuals’ religious belief or to oblige them to reveal their beliefs,” the ECHR’s ruling said.

The Education Minister of Greece, Niki Kerameus, pledged to abide by the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights and alter the ways in which RE classes take place in Greece as well as revise the procedure to ask for an exemption from the course. This ruling essentially puts in practice changes which the former Minister of Education, Nikos Filis, under the left-wing SYRIZA government, sought to make. In particular, Filis attempted to make RE in Greek schools more secular, diverse, and less focused on Christianity.

As it is currently the case, the nature of RE classes is catechistic and indoctrinates students in the Greek Orthodox religion. Because of this, Nikos Filis put forward certain proposals through which he hoped to modernize RE and enable students to learn about religions other than Christianity. However, the proposed changes were deemed unconstitutional by Greece’s Council of State on the grounds that the government’s plan “distorted the purpose of [religious] teaching, which is, according to the Constitution, to develop pupils’ Orthodox Christian conscience”. The Council of State’s stance and its focus on developing “pupils’ Orthodox Christian conscience” is not surprising given the fact that Greece is one of the few countries in Europe which has a state religion.

In fact, religion plays a major role not only in the everyday lives of Greek people and in the political scene but also in the education system. It is common for schools in Greece to have compulsory morning prayer, religious icons in classes, to take trips of religious context, or to host ‘blessing rituals’ at the start of the academic year. Sometimes, it takes regional human rights cases to bring this to light.

In the end, Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights was ruled as breached in the ECHR court case with Article 2 of Protocol 1 protecting the right to an education. It states:

No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the state shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

The NSS stated, “The article requires states to ‘respect’ parents’ rights to ensure education and teaching is “in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions… The court ruled that the declaration requirement risked ‘placing an undue burden on parents’ and exposing ‘sensitive aspects of their private life.’”

The intervention portion from the NSS was drafted by Professor Ronan McCrea of UCL with input from Harry Small and Sadikur Rahman. With the efforts of the students and the parents, and the support of the NSS and its drafters of the NSS intervention, individual religious and belief rights have remained more respected than before.

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Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019).

Here we talk about the British and the Americans, and the American Revolutionary War.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The British Empire produced some of the prominent Western philosophers, empiricists, and others. Obviously, the Americans and the British had a strained relationship for some time. What were some of the statements and ideas of the freethinkers on the American and the British sides during the American Revolutionary War? What were the different reactions to the American Revolution of the 13 colonies and the British Empire? What happened to the secular, men and women, during this time of war – common in American history?

Dr. Herb Silverman: The term freethinker emerged towards the end of the 17th century in England to describe people who stood in opposition to Christian churches and literal belief in the Bible. These people believed that they could understand the world through consideration of nature. In the United States, freethought was an anti-Christian and anti-clerical movement to make an individual politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on religious matters.

John Toland, an Irish philosopher and freethinker in the 18^th century, was the first person called a freethinker (by George Berkeley, a Bishop in Ireland). Toland wrote over a hundred books, mostly dedicated to criticizing ecclesiastical institutions. In Christianity Not Mysterious, the book for which he is best known, Toland challenged not just the authority of the established church, but all inherited and unquestioned authority. Because of this book, he was prosecuted by a grand jury in London. The Parliament of Ireland proposed that he should be burnt at the stake, and in his absence three copies of the book were burnt by the public hangman.

British deists and freethinkers including John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal focused on the human roots of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and ancient Paganism. They advocated tolerance and freedom of thought and fought against the influence of Christian doctrine on political and social life. They also denied the supernatural foundations of Christianity and analyzed the Bible with the aim to promote the free search for truth. They helped bring about Enlightenment views of religion and the secularization of Europe.

John Locke, who was British, inspired both the American and French revolutions. His arguments concerning liberty and the social contract motivated written works by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other founding fathers of the United States. One of Locke’s passages is reproduced verbatim in the Declaration of Independence, the reference to a “long train of abuses.” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Bacon, Locke, and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived.”

Locke’s theory of the “social contract” influenced the belief of many founders that the right of the people to overthrow their leaders was one of the “natural rights” of man. He also argued that all humans were created equally free, and governments therefore needed the “consent of the governed.” Many scholars trace the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence to Locke’s theory of natural rights. At the time of the American revolution, the belief that rights came from God was widespread. British citizens believed in the divine right of kings.

Unlike many American founders, Locke was not a deist or a freethinker. He was a theist who accepted the cosmological (first cause) argument for the existence of God. Had Locke been born in our time, he might well have been an atheist.

Locke also had a strong influence on the French deist Voltaire, who called him “le sage Locke.” Voltaire’s major contribution to our founding fathers was his tireless quest for civil rights and his support for freedom of religion as well as separation of church and state. Voltaire’s reasoning may be summed up in his well-known saying, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” But my favorite quote of Voltaire is, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

Many Americans at the time of the Revolution were attracted to “secular millennialism,” a belief that we would someday be transformed into a utopian world of peace, justice, prosperity, and fellowship. The focus is on “worldly” transformation as opposed to “other-worldly” promises of spiritual salvation after death. Such predictions of America’s destiny came from people like Thomas Paine and his enormously influential pamphlet Common Sense. The pamphlet’s millennial-style passages include “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine added, “The birthday of a new world is at hand.” In Paine’s view this new world would be far from theocracy, grounded not on ecclesiastical authority, but on the principles of a democratic republic and equal rights.

While religious ideology was an important inspiration for many Americans, the military of the new American nation had no religious policy. Soldiers mostly appeared to have been indifferent to the religious consequence of the Revolutionary War. The war was over the birth of a new nation, rather than a new nation-with-church. Both the British and American sides tried to recruit Americans from every background for their cause. For many Americans, the ecclesiastical tyranny of tax-supported religious establishments was another form of oppression they were fighting against

The American Revolution hurt the Church of England in America more than any other denomination because the King of England was the head of that church. Anglican priests in America swore allegiance to the King. The Book of Common Prayer offered prayers asking God to give the king victory over all his enemies. In 1776, the King’s enemies were American soldiers and loyalty to that church could be construed as treason. So, Anglicans in America revised The Book of Common Prayer to conform to political realities, eliminating allegiance to the king.

The Franco-American Alliance brought thousands of French troops onto American soil, exposing American soldiers to advanced forms of freethinking and anticlericalism. The American Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution of the United States also inspired the French revolutionaries of 1789, offering an example of liberty for the world and an example for modern constitutional democracies. The French Revolution motivated people to put irreligious ideas of the Enlightenment into practice and later extended beyond France to other European countries, and to the American colonies. For Americans at that time, irreligion more often took deistic rather than an atheistic form.

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Silverman.

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