It sounds reassuring to be told that your right to practise your religion, and your right as a parent to have your child educated according to your beliefs, are enshrined in human rights law in the form of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Unfortunately a decision last Wednesday, 19 November, from the UK Supreme Court shows just how hollow this right has become.
In Northern Ireland, religion is central to many state schools. Some are Catholic, some Church of Ireland or Presbyterian, and some Christian but non-denominational. In all of them, however, Christian belief is taken as a theme permeating the enterprise of education, rather than just another subject of critical study.
To balance this and protect freedom of conscience, a counterweight is provided, in the shape of a parent’s absolute right in to withdraw a child from religious education.
This regime lay at the heart of the case before the Supreme Court. A girl who had been through a non-denominational Christian school made common cause with her father, a committed humanist, in claiming that its application had infringed their human rights.
It was, they said, unacceptable that Christianity had been treated as a bedrock of the child’s religious education rather than being treated in an “objective, critical and pluralist” manner so as to avoid “indoctrination", as required by a series of cases from Strasbourg interpreting the ECHR.
If they were right, then (as the judges realised and this one particular parent no doubt quietly wished), the whole system of religious education would have to be radically remodelled, with any element of seeing religion as a given removed.
The Northern Irish Court of Appeal sagely sidestepped this trap, and avoided a collision course with people of faith, by saying that even if religion had not been taught in an “objective, critical and pluralist” manner, the fact that no child was forced to submit to the teaching drew the sting of any complaint.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court was having none of this sweet reasonableness.
Parents' rights to withdraw their child from religious education, they said, were all very well. But they might if exercised stigmatise the child in front of peers, and cause the parents indirectly to publicise their irreligion; it thus needed to be disregarded as an over-burdensome remedy. It followed that the girl therefore was being treated as someone forced to undergo state-sponsored religious indoctrination, contrary to the rights of her and her parents.
Whatever the legal minutiae, the result of this decision is stark: whether we like it or not, human rights law now apparently allows children in state schools to be taught about religion, but not to be educated according to the tenets of any particular religious tradition. The sound instinct of any Catholic to guide their entire life, and that of their children, in a natural submission to God must now stop abruptly at the school gates.
This is seriously depressing. There was no compulsion to reach this decision. The law was uncertain. The Supreme Court could perfectly well have let sleeping dogs lie and avoided upsetting an arrangement that, on the whole, worked.
Instead, it regarded it as obvious that the enormously human idea of the fundamentality of our religious life must now give way to such comparatively minor matters as a parent’s possible embarrassment at their own exposed lack of religion, and possible dirty looks at the child.
We have always known that the European Court of Human Rights is inclined to the imposition by law of a de facto aggressive laïcité de l’état and secular compulsion by the State; now unfortunately the virus seems to be spreading.
The social effects of this judgment are even worse. Instead of allowing faithful people in school (whether Catholic or of any other denomination) to take their part in the vital task of educating the young in the image of God, and thus marking their school as a beacon of light, we now have a dreary state-imposed uniformity: all religious education in state education must be boringly scientistic and relativistic (“objective, critical and pluralist”), amounting to secularism in all but name.
Unless, of course, you happen to be rich enough to afford ruinously expensive private education. For the well-heeled bankers and lawyers, bringing up the family according to the tenets of true religion remains possible: for the rest of us it has just been made enormously more difficult.
And worse, all this has happened outside the political arena in the name of supposedly supra-political human rights. However much a community may want to have schools that reflect their view of the good, the decision has now been transferred from the democratic process to the dry determinations of human rights lawyers.
At one time it was possible for people of faith to see human rights in the shape of the ECHR as not only consistent with their belief but as intimately bound up with them. No longer: today, far from supporting people of faith, the ECHR as often as not works against their interests.
Say it quietly, but the possibility of leaving the Convention completely appears increasingly as not only compatible with the need to promote the faith, but possibly even essential to it.
RELATED: Is the Supreme Court trying to strip the UK of all its Christian vestiges?
Photo: The façade of the Supreme Court in central London, England, 1August 2025 (Photo by NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images)
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