Is religion really a toxic brand?

If the purpose of religious and moral teaching is to make people good, it has failed (Editorial, 17 February). We are no better now than we were a thousand years ago. What makes us act rightly is our character – that part of ourselves where our instincts and virtues repose without our constant, conscious awareness. For example, those Poles and Dutch who sheltered Jews from the Nazis did so impulsively without weighing moral imperatives or self-interest. The men who leapt upon the terrorist on the 15.17 to Paris did so without conscious reference to their Christian values. One said afterwards that he couldn’t remember how he got from his seat to the fight. Those people displayed good character with its submerged virtues of courage and compassion. It cannot be taught, no more than an acorn can be instructed to become a tree. It must be nurtured: that means, for a start, that all infants must have a secure, contented and loving upbringing; and that means generous state support and provision for feckless, incapable and unlucky parents. Schools on their own are helpless in this matter.
Michael McManus
Leeds

• Your recognition that humanism should form part of religious education is welcome, especially as the Department for Education has defiantly refused to accept a recent court judgment to that effect. But your next remark is even more important: “this needs to be part of a much bigger shake-up”. Too often at present RE syllabuses deal with “the six world religions” (and occasionally humanism) in silos, each with its own allocation of time, and too often uncritically on their own terms.

Instead, the subject should combine historical, cultural, social, political and philosophical perspectives in looking critically at the beliefs and values of religions and non-religious alternatives in the real world. Overall it should aim to help young people make sense of living in the world by equipping them to ask intelligent questions, to critique what they are told and to make up their own minds.
David Pollock
London

• So religion is a “toxic brand”. That’s how we now view those people who, prompted by their faith, cared for widows and orphans, built almshouses, hospitals, foundling homes, shelters and schools; and who in later times have been the mainstay of relief organisations, aid societies, street pastors, soup kitchens, food banks, and support for refugees and the homeless. But of course these things and all such good works are merely expressions of intrinsic human kindness and aren’t related in any way to religious convictions, whereas any wrongdoing can glibly be laid at the door of religious belief.
Alan Bamber
Bishopswood, Somerset

• Your editorial in praise of religious education in schools seems, on the face of it, to put a reasonable case for supporting moral education and national values. Yet this argument is, for the majority of Britons, a busted flush. None of the main churches support the law of the land over equal marriage for gay couples, none support the majority wishes of the people for assisted dying for the terminally ill, and the two largest denominations, the established Church of England and the Roman Catholic church, defy the law that pertains to all other employers over equal opportunities for women. These are our national values, engrossed in legislation, and RE, too often in the grasp of church appointees in church schools, cannot be trusted to support where our nation has got to – including over abortion and contraception. A better idea is the moral education movement, which since the 1960s has offered a curriculum open to debate on our values, free from ecclesiastical censorship.
Professor Callum Brown
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow

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