There has been a lot of positive and often emotive public support for the Please Don’t Label Me billboard campaign, including agreeable comments from the Evangelical Alliance, that “You are not a Christian simply because your parents are” and adding, “Every child or adult has to make up their own minds about the reality of God” … or otherwise, presumably.
The Times has created a story this evening about the models used in the posters, making much out of the fact that their father is a Christian. Actually the piece refers uncritically to the 7 and 8-year olds as “devout Christian children”, rather missing the point of the campaign.
“It doesn’t matter whether the children are the children of Christians, Hindus or humanists – that’s precisely one of the points of our campaign,” said Andrew Copson, BHA Director of Education and Public Affairs.
From a slogan which is exclusively about labelling children (“Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself”) a number of other commentators have mistakenly, or intentionally, over-inflated or missed the point of the campaign entirely. These commentators share a common theme of implying that Please Don’t Label Me is an indiscriminate attack on any religious parents who utter any religious belief in the presence of children.
- Jan Ainsworth, the Church of England’s Chief Education Officer, represents the message as: “it is a Very Bad Thing that parents might try and bring up their children within a religious or philosophical framework of their choosing.”
- George Pitcher, the Telegraph’s Religion Editor and an Anglican priest, decided that the message was “all Christians are brainwashed, wall-eyed literalists”. “In the end,” he says, “these humanists aren’t worried about “labels” at all. What they want to abolish is children being brought up in any kind of faith tradition.”
- Religious commentator Theo Hobson writing on the Spectator “Faith Based” blog, claims that “To suggest that one does cultural violence to one’s child by exposing him or her to religion is very close to nutty”. Er, that’s not what we suggested.
- Graham Coyle of the Christian Schools Trust represents the campaign as an attack on any and all moral education: “They seem to be saying that they don’t want parents to pass on to their children their fundamental beliefs – about what is right and wrong, about respect for other people and living in harmony.”
- Paul Woolley, Director of the Bible Society’s thinktank, Theos, apparently understood the campaign as saying that children should be raised from a “position of philosophical neutrality”, “a value-neutral cultural space”. As he points out this is neither possible nor desirable, but then neither is it what the campaign suggests.
- Free Presbyterian Minister Rev David McIlveen said, “It is the height of arrogance that they would try to interfere between children and parents and what faith they are instructed in”… or none, presumably.
“You have to wonder why these commentators can’t just agree that there is an extreme of presumption which is coercive and should be avoided.” said Andrew Copson. “People who criticise us as if we’d said that children raised in religious families couldn’t be happy or that no child should have any contact with religion or learn anything about it at all should take the time to read the adverts and think about their message rather than rely on their own assumptions.
“The message of the posters is that the labelling of children by their parents’ religion fails to respect the rights of the child and curtails their autonomy. We are saying that religions and philosophies (and ‘Humanist’ is one of the labels we use on our poster) should not be foisted on or assumed of young children and that young people have the right to choose for themselves in line with their developing capacities as they grow. That’s very far from saying that any possible reference to religion should be prohibited in the home!”
Notes
A point about our photos: The images of the children for the billboards were sourced from istockphoto.com, a well known stock photography website. Images are uploaded by photographers for sale to designers and are paid for by credits that are purchased in advance. The photographer receives a portion of this sum as a one off payment per download. In order to submit an image of a child, the parents of the child must sign a release form on their behalf that states that the image may be used by the purchaser for any reasonable purpose within the terms and conditions that are available on the website.
For images of the billboards, and FAQs, visit humanists.uk/billboards.
For more detailed responses to a few critics see humanists.uk/billboards/critical-thinking/critics
The British Humanist Association (BHA) is the national charity representing and supporting the non-religious and promoting Humanism. In education, it campaigns for inclusive schools with no religious admissions policies, balanced teaching about different beliefs and values, and no ‘collective worship’; the BHA is in favour of the phasing out of state funded ‘faith’ schools and campaigns nationally and locally for this cause.
The fundraising campaign to raise money for the BHA’s work against state funded faith schools is at www.justgiving.com/nofaithschools