“Don’t sing hymns that are too preachy,” says the Church of England.
Not quite.
That’s what The Times headline claims the Church of England says.
The reality is, of course, more nuanced.
In May, the Church of England made some recommendations for their schools with regard to collective worship. One could interpret a few phrases in the document as meaning that schools should avoid ‘preachy’ hymns. As a comedy writer, I have no problem with stereotyping and hyperbole. Jesus employs those tactics when he’s satirising the Temple pedants and hypocrites. And I’ve called this article ‘All Things Bland and Banal’, which sounds good, but doesn’t describe the words below.
The question is this: why would the Church of England say something like this in official guidance to their schools?
The report makes clear the aspiration for collective worship in their schools: it should be inclusive, invitational and inspiring. These are excellent values, especially when you consider that many older people found collective worship at school to be the opposite: exclusive, irrelevant and boring. I meet people for whom the religious instruction at school was even worse, finding it aggressive, joyless and traumatising.
It Takes Three
There is plenty of research to show that the most effective way to disciple children in the Christian faith is through the family, in partnership with the Church and a school. It makes sense. How confusing must it be for children when these three realms are talking about completely different things?
So what is the aim of a Christian education as far as the Church of England is concerned? It is that pupils leave a Church of England school “with a rich experience and understanding of Christianity” having being offered:
“an encounter with Jesus Christ and with Christian faith and practice in a way that enhances their lives. Collective worship in schools, including prayer, reading and reflecting on the Bible, liturgy, sacrament and experience of the musical and other imaginative riches of Christianity, provide a vital opportunity for this.”
It’s a solid aim, but there’s a limit to what a school can do on its own, given the immense pressure of the National Curriculum and the way in which almost every ill in society needs to be fixed with the refrain ‘Why don’t they teach this in schools?’
Dissenting Voices
Church of England schools, administrators and Christian teachers also have the continual noise of a few but loud and influential voices which are determined that their child not be exposed to any Christian teaching whatsoever. Such parents are within their rights to have these views, and by exercising them, essentially admit that it is primarily the parents’ responsibility to educate their children and not the state or the church. In that sense, I agree with them.
I don’t sense any mainstream appetite for the removal of all religion from state education. Quite the reverse. Most parents would like help instilling values into their children, and many would happily want them to be Christian values, even if they are hazy on the details of the Christian faith itself.
Thou Shalt Be British
In 2014, schools were commanded to teach British values. Was the assumption that these values would be Christian? Advice issued by the Department of Education that year reminded schools to “promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society”.
But where do these values come from? What are they based on? Such values do not come out of thin air. As Tom Holland persuasively argues in his book Dominion, the way things are today and the values we hold come from Christianity. But the government advice in 2014, and a Conservative government at that time, did not once use the word ‘Christian’.
How Did We Get Here?
In purely education terms, much of British history makes very little sense without an understanding of the motivation of Christians. How else can we understand the reigns of the Tudors, and then the Stuarts as the country slid into a religious civil war? I’ve argued elsewhere that we fail to talk about, teach and understand the English Civil War because we have a hard time believing that your Christian faith could make a reasonable Englishman take up arms to fight his brother on the battlefield, but that is precisely what happened. We then won’t understand what motivated the dethroning of Catholic James II, and the so-called Glorious Revolution.
Clearly our Christian heritage has caused division and bloodshed, and we must grapple with that. But we should also understand that John Wycliffe and William Tyndale wanted the Bible to be available to all in the English language. Why did William Wilberforce and his abolitionist friends persevere in the cause of abolishing slavery, despite the entrenched interests of the elite and general apathy from the population as a whole?
Without understanding Christianity, we won’t fathom who Quakers are and why they were essentially excluded from society, made chocolate and housed their workers, setting a new standard in the workplace.
We won’t understand why puritans sailed from Plymouth to found America – and why America is as it is in Boston, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. And we will miss the reason that Lord Shaftesbury laboured to ensure young children weren’t sent to work down mines, up chimneys or under lethal machinery.
Experiments in Schooling
Atheists are, of course, at liberty to set up their own schools and teach Robespierre, Rabelais, Diderot and Voltaire, and collectively worship the Enlightment Goddess of Reason as their French revolutionary forebears did in the 1790s. Or they could establish some version of Experiment House, the school of Eustace and Jill we read about in CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair.
There’s very little appetite for that kind of school. Most people, I’m pleased to say, are not prepared to experiment on their own children. But even if there were enough people in one area to set up an atheist school, why would they bother when they can bend all of the existing local schools to their will with activism and social media campaigns, all in the name of religious neutrality?
If you want to see a test case, have a look at the story of a school chaplain, Rev. Dr Bernard Randall at Trent College in Derbyshire who was referred to the anti-terrorism programme Prevent and sacked for gross misconduct after he told pupils they were free to criticise the school’s LGBT policy.
To Sing Or Not To Sing?
In this climate, what is a Christian school to do? What Christian hymns and songs can be sung that aren’t ‘preachy’ but inclusive, invitational and inspiring?
Classic hymns tend to declare the works and character of God like this classic:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.
Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.
Modern choruses tend to emphasis how I feel about God, as we sing in the second half of ‘You Laid Aside Your Majesty’ by Noel Richards:
I really want to worship You, my Lord,
You have won my heart
And I am Yours for ever and ever;
I will love You.
You are the only one who died for me,
Gave Your life to set me free,
So I lift my voice to You in adoration.
One problem is that even as a believer in Christ, I frequently don’t want to really worship my Lord. Maybe on a good day.
But whatever hymn or chorus you choose in a school for collective worship, you are putting words into the mouths of children. I’m not aware of many hymns written to be sung by people who aren’t too sure about who God is, how they feel about him and what they believe.
Sing Like You Just Don’t Care
Maybe we’re overthinking this. Plenty of people are happy to sing songs they don’t agree with. Anti-royalists might sing ‘God Save the Queen’ because it’s the national anthem, and it’s a service of remembrance. England rugby fans sing ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, despite having no experience of the African-American spiritual tradition whence it came. And you can singalong to the karaoke version of ‘Every breath you take’ without condoning stalking.
My instinct is that the Church of England could be more robust and suggest plenty of Christian hymns that leave the character, identity, love and power of God in no doubt whatsoever. Few parents would have any problem with it. The kids don’t care and might enjoy a good sing song. And the meaning of the words will become evident as they grow in knowledge and understanding. They may end up disagreeing with them, as millions have in our society.
For me, the more interesting aspect of the stated aim of the Church of England schools is the bit about ‘reading and reflecting on the Bible… and other imaginative riches of Christianity’. But I’ll write about that in a couple of weeks.
Next week, there’ll be one last article about my new book, The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer, which is out on 17th June. You can buy a signed copy from me directly if you are in the UK. In fact, you can buy more than one copy – one for your downstairs loo, and one for a friend – as well as a copy of previous book, The Sacred Art of Joking (in which I look at the way in which Jesus uses hyperbole and satire as mentioned above).
Order before 8pm on Monday 21st June and you will be invited to an e-launch on Zoom, in which I will explain how the book came about, read a few extracts, and then answer any questions you have, while you drink better wine than you would get at a book launch in the comfort of your own home.
Let's not expect schools to use those wimpish touchy-feely modern chorusses, most of them aren't even musically singable let alone lyrically edifying, and making schoolkids sing them will only be either deeply alienating or severe psychological abuse. Despite not understanding or believing a word of them, they will remember the gutsy old hymns with fondness and who know, maybe consider what they were all about.