David Pollock, President of the European Humanist Federation. http://humanistfederation.eu
Speaking at a seminar in Brussels yesterday, European Humanist Federation president David Pollock suggested that all states in Europe were progressing, from different starting points and at different speeds, towards secularism.
He was commenting on part of an EU-financed study on Identities and Modernities in Europe, a collaboration between several universities across Europe, part of which had looked at religion in schools in Bulgaria, Croatia, France and the United Kingdom – see here.
He said: “From the time of the Westphalian settlement, when states stopped trying to impose their religion on other states in the wars of religion and decided instead that cuius regio, eius religio*, governments have taken sides on what religion their citizens should follow and have only slowly come to concede individual liberty. . . But no state has fully followed through the implications of individual freedom of religion or belief . . .
“Even so, European standards are, at least formally, secularist – in the sense of neutral as between different religions and beliefs. Defenders of church privilege try to depict a secular state as an atheist state. They are wrong, and sometimes cynically and consciously wrong. A secular state, by not taking sides for or against religion or atheism, for or against one belief or another, is the best guarantor we have of freedom of religion or belief. Europe has espoused secularism, human rights and equality and non-discrimination . . .
“In this neutrality, this secularism, the European institutions reflect the views of the population. Europeans are increasingly alienated from religion and religious institutions. This has been repeatedly demonstrated in the EU’s own Eurobarometer surveys, carried out across Europe . . .
“So I believe that the contrasts brought out by today’s research are reflections less of fundamental differences between the four states studied than of the distance each has travelled towards secularism in its role as guarantor of freedom of religion or belief from their hugely different starting points. Thus their historical backgrounds, rather than any principled policy-making, has determined where each country stands on the treatment of religion in school.”
David Pollock’s full remarks are here.
* “The religion of a state shall be that of its ruler.”
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