There is a much-contested law that insists schools are to provide a daily act of worship (or “religious observance” in Scotland) to those in their charge, and for it to be “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character” (unless the school is of a different faith).
To many, the law sits alongside those risible and obsolete regulations like Hackney cabs always having to have a bale of hay in tow (a law that wasn’t repealed until 1976). It simply should not apply to a plural and largely post-Christian culture, and its application seems to many to be irrelevant at best and, at worst, offensive. Indeed, where the law is applied by schools, the flare-ups that occur occasionally go beyond the moral outrage of Twitter and into the broadsheets and courts.
At least one such case occurred recently, in Oxfordshire. The parents of two children attending a school took exception to the explicitly Christian content of assemblies (the school had been taken over by a Christian academy), and exercised their right to withdraw their children.
The children were not offered an alternative use of time that had much value - they were given a supervisor and iPads to use in a separate room until assembly finished. This appears to be a lazy decision by the school and has been justly challenged by the parents, who have been given permission to take the school to the High Court; as the Humanists UK site reported it, “The parents will argue that the school must also provide a meaningful alternative of equal educational worth for those pupils withdrawn from it.”
The words “educational worth” used here are uncannily appropriate. Worship, as it’s understood in today’s ears, is dusty and vague, conjuring images of Songs of Praise. However, as with many old words, a look at the etymology rewards the curious.
“Worship” stems from the Old English word woerthship - so, by worshipping something, we proclaim its worth. And so a Christian act of worship proclaims the worth of the Christian God, and a Muslim act the Muslim concept of God, and so on. You can see why an act of Christian worship foisted on non-believers would make some pupils and parents baulk.
However, it does not follow that, because the object of Christian worship is no longer relevant to many today, the idea of worship in general is also irrelevant. On the contrary, people will always be worshipping something - though the object of that worship may well be less obvious than with organised religion. If a school dispensed with the daily act of worship, then it would do well to pause before dispensing with the idea of worship in general, for worship is a fulcrum for human behaviour - both religious and non-religious - and warrants at least a little regular reflection.
What one worships becomes clear if we rephrase the question to “what gives your life hope, purpose and meaning?” Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argued that when we lack purpose and meaning, we cease to flourish and, in his experience, we die. Frankl reached this conclusion when he was an inmate of Auschwitz concentration camp. He found that those who had hope and meaning tended to survive, whereas the people who lost hope very quickly died.
Atheist philosopher John Gray’s ideas are somewhat kindred. Gray observed that, when communists banned religion and its expressions during the 20th century, the religious urge expressed itself instead through communism: hope for a better world, progress towards an ideal that could be worshipped. Indeed, the religious parallels are stark when you think of the mausoleums of Vladimir Lenin or Chairman Mao (sites of veneration and pilgrimage for many), and the Little Red Book that formed and informed the culture of the time.
In the same vein, writer David Foster Wallace gave this advice to graduating students at Kenyon College: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” This he applied to the worship of money, beauty, power and intellect, adding that “the insidious thing about these forms of worship is … they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”
Wallace is compelling and poetic here, but I think he might have overstated the element of choice in what we worship. Ultimately, of course, you are the captain of your soul, though you are also subject to the myriad influences of contemporary culture, background, religion, peer group and institution.
Philosopher James K A Smith uses the shopping mall as an illustration of how consumerism gives us objects to worship. In a shopping mall, we have our desires directed towards material wealth and aesthetic beauty - the icons and adverts of a consumerist culture are there to arouse desire by making us worship a particular lifestyle and strive towards living it. It is a truism to point out that consumerism is not just in the business of selling products - it also sells ideas and ideals.
This is seldom acknowledged or spoken about. Partly because it attempts to move our hearts rather than our heads, it is more felt than thought. We may say that we know that it is silly to worship material wealth or beauty, though the time and money we spend may well belie that claim.
What we are worshipping will ultimately direct and shape our lives and our priorities. The great American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “a person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine lives, and our character. Therefore, it behoves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming”.
The students who pass through our doors are soaked in the values conveyed to them over Instagram, Love Island or whatever other app or series du jour is doing the rounds. This does not affect what they think as much as what they feel and, ultimately, what they do. It is not uncommon to speak to a student who has done something they rationally know to be stupid or wrong, where they were driven by desire more than thought - by worshipping at the altar of popularity or achievement.
A school, like any other institution, will also have ideals that are worshipped and embodied. There will be practices and ceremonies that cultivate or give shape to certain desires, such as sporting prowess, academic excellence and artistic genius. If you look into the practices of a school, you should be able to discern a system of values that is being communicated to the students, perhaps explicitly, though often implicitly through what is given recognition and what is not. These values are teaching pupils to have certain ideals to worship, things to strive towards. The values of a school may be similar to those of a culture, or they may attempt some kind of counterformation, some effort to subvert the direction of culture today.
The nature writer Nan Shepherd used to teach at Aberdeen College of Education, where she saw her mission as a ‘‘heaven-appointed task of trying to prevent a few of the students who pass through our institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern”. Today, steeped in a culture with a mental health crisis, fragmentation of communities, violence and social and political turmoil, there are very good reasons for thinking schools should be taking on that very same task. One could make a strong argument that some of the problems the world now faces are down to worshipping the wrong things (worship of continual economic growth and individualism has helped destroy the environment and fragment communities).
The observation that humans are motivated and moved by what they worship is nothing new, though it’s rarely an insight spoken of within the secular world of education.
In the fourth century, St Augustine observed that humans are fundamentally desiring or worshipping beings - they will devote themselves to something. He thought one of the key tasks in life was to have our loves in the right order; sin was to have our loves disordered. There will no doubt be disagreement about what the “right order” of desires is. But however wildly viewpoints might diverge from one another, an awareness of the invisible forces that shape us seems like a useful place for everyone to begin.
So if the daily act of worship has been dispensed with by a school, here is a modest proposal for something of “equal educational worth”: spend some time contemplating what it is that we do worship, both as institutions and as individuals. Use that time to see the ground beneath our feet, to try to articulate the invisible ideals that shape our imaginations and guide our decisions.
If this all sounds a little abstract, here are several concrete and distinct tasks that educators would do well to consider: discern, articulate and implement.
There is first the task of discerning what the school culture is implicitly teaching pupils and staff to admire and admonish - which unspoken values are being communicated? Then there is the job of considering whether these values actually reflect the core values and vision of the school, and whether they need to be articulated afresh or indeed redrawn. Finally, if discerning what is and articulating what should be are out of kilter, then some attention needs to be paid to how best to (re)implement the core values: which cultural habits and uses of language need to be reconsidered?
The implementation should pervade classrooms, corridors and assembly halls, and would provide clarity of purpose and vision for those who work there - if they were willing to think carefully about their particular forms of worship.
Kenneth Primrose was head of religious, moral and philosophical studies at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, and has recently relocated to Newcastle to take up a school-leadership position
This article originally appeared in the 20 SEPTEMBER 2019 issue under the headline “Abandon worship”
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