CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

Jew believes in Christian education

As a Jew, I'm a firm believer in the virtues of a Christian education
By Howard Jacobson

It isn't every day you get to fall out with your own newspaper and a friend. But a leader in last week's Independent, quoting from and pretty well in tune with that doughty philosopher Anthony Grayling, has left me with no option. You are wrong, mes amis. Well-meaning, but wrong.

The subject, should another week of national disasters have blasted it from your minds, was church schools, locally funded single-faith teaching and, by implication, the teaching of religion altogether. "Why should an atheist taxpayer like me be forced to fund these schools?" this paper reported Dr Grayling as saying. "If I were to set up a school which taught belief in fairies and I wanted government money no one would say yes."

In fact, the teaching of belief in fairies, whether those fairies went by the name of Karl Marx, Roland Barthes, Wittgenstein or Women's Studies, was enthusiastically funded in our academies in the century just past. Very soon we will have Universities of Harry Potter, and who then will dare refuse money to a Department of Applied Wizardry? The fairies are always with us in one shape or another, Anthony, and there are some who would consider your atheism to be as chimerical as any faith on the market. When it comes to the absurd business of belief, confident expressions of disbelief sound no less extravagant than conviction.

But then Dr Grayling, presumably, is not asking for the teaching of atheism to be state-funded. Or is he? Isn't silence about religion in schools itself a sort of sneak-thief atheism? Yes, I know that silence isn't the only alternative to full-blown inculcation. I know there's a form of religious teaching that carefully eschews devotion, comparative religion or whatever they call that cute interdenominational sampling of everybody's amazing customs – Wow, Baruch, love your fringes! – but that's just ethnic ring-a-ring o' roses, after which we all fall down. Myself, coming religiously from nowhere, I welcome the return of religious education to our schools, however it's funded. We are the poorer – no less intellectually than spiritually – if we do not acquire the wherewithal to believe. We are the poorer, too, assuredly, if we do not acquire the wherewithal to disbelieve, but without inward understanding of the workings of belief, our disbelief isn't worth a candle. Hear Richard Dawkins inveighing against religion and you confront shallows in the human mind which you would never have imagined capable of supporting mental life.

Most people acknowledge briefly, some time, the insufficiencies of their philosophy, even if only as a matter of euphony, of aesthetical tact, to avoid that hollow clatter of the ego as it bumps along the dried-up bottom of itself. The pride Richard Dawkins takes in himself as a man who has escaped superstition, is nothing less than pride in having missed out on an education; for it trumpets ignorance of the emotional life of other men.

Something there is about religion before it atrophies, however much one abhors its dogmatism and divisiveness at the best of times, which makes it, educationally, a friend of culture. Not only does it, by definition, address the seriousness of life – the beginning and the end more convincingly, I grant you, than the middle – but it is invariably contemplative and bookish; it lives among words; it winds itself around thought. Yes, yes, its bookishness can be mawkish, its words can deteriorate into sorcery, and its hold on thought can take the form of strangulation; but here we stand in our proud irreligion, taking no shit from the fairies, yet whoever beheld a people so wordless, so short of a book worth the opening, or so stuck for a thought?

Do we grow sillier as we grow more godless? Too early to say. But so far there is no sign that we grow any smarter.

Argue all you like against the usefulness of religious teaching now, the historical fact of religion is an obstinacy which nothing that calls itself an education can responsibly ignore. For our own part as Englishmen, we are a mystery to ourselves as exponents of our own language without knowledge of what religion has wrought in us. When I say knowledge I mean hot knowledge, insider knowledge, not the cold curiosity of the antiquarian.

And when I say religion I mean Christianity. No point beating about the bush here, the religion without which we would not be who we are is not comparative, all fall down religion, but Christianity – Old Testament (selections of), New Testament, Mary, Jesus, crucifixion, resurrection – all that. As made English by the King James Bible, as acculturated by Presbyterians and Puseyists, as re-conceived by Shakespeare, Milton, Blake.

Leaving me, as a Jew, where? Precisely where I always was, locked away for half an hour a day in a schoolroom full of other Jewish boys, listening to the Christians singing hymns. Separate but fascinated, feeling foreign, aching to have what they have in their assembly, their rock of ages, and then again happy to have what I have, the unutterable name. The one thing I don't feel is aggrieved. I refuse the sentimentalities of multiculturalism. We may see ourselves as bringing gifts, we Jews and Sikhs and Muslims, increments of faith and understanding from which this country can only profit. But we can no more suppose that our systems of belief have an equal place in English culture than we would allow Christianity to have an equal place in ours.

As for Grayling's atheism, I would of course have that taught as well. A fourth-form course. Intermediate Fairy Studies.

And Dawkins?

Advanced Presumption.