When tradition deserves a break

Upsetting a convention caused uproar, so is it right to break with tradition?

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

A robed and seated man, in a speaker's chair talks and gesticulates.

The House of Common's Speaker.

Parliament TV.

“Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since a speaker of the Commons stood down from its high chair with dignity and to applause.” Thus wrote Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian this Sunday. Last week the House of Commons erupted. An unedifying lava-spew of recrimination and anger flowed through the corridors of power as the Speaker of the House, The Right Honourable Sir Lindsay Hoyle, broke parliamentary convention to the seeming benefit of the Labour Party. Memories of his predecessors’ playing fast-and-loose with Parliamentary procedure pushed buttons. The SNP’s Gaelic fury founded a flurry of calls for the Speaker to step-down, and it was not until he gave a near-tearful apology that some calm seemed to be restored. Opponents cried foul - ‘how dare he upend the conventions of the House!?’ - while supporters jumped to his aid - ‘he was just trying to protect MPs from further harassment over the Israel-Gaza debate!’ - and everyone was unhappy…

The technicalities of this convention (that multiple amendments are not called upon for voting during an Opposition Day Debate) are less interesting to me than the fact that the convention exists. ‘Convention’ is another word for ‘tradition’. Traditions are important. Our famously ‘unwritten’ Constitution relies heavily on tradition, especially for the smooth running of Parliament. Rather than having the process of legislating and governing micro-managed with procedural minutiae, the Commons operate on the basis of nurturing and conforming to its traditions. In essence, the House of Commons operates on the basis of respect - by respecting the traditions of the House, Parliamentarians grow to respect each other as fellow followers of tradition. Exterior action builds-up interior disposition. Practice influences sentiment.

At least, that’s my romantic take on it. Traditions give some coherence to a society - from the society of elected MPs right through the society of a nation - and allow it to flourish. Traditions bind people together. Traditions unite. You may come from a different part of the country than your neighbour, have different family values, have a different religion or skin-colour or education-level, etc…but you can be united in the traditions you follow. Whether it’s having a roast on a Sunday, going to a Carol Service in December, singing Three Lions in a World Cup year, the traditions you share despite all other differences give you a common cause with those around you.

This is not to say that traditions can’t have a dark side. Some traditions can alienate guests. Some traditions can stifle creativity and innovation. Some traditions can be maintained purely to bamboozle the uninitiated for the benefit of those in the know. In extremis, some traditions can lead to groupthink, to the othering of those who don’t share them, to jingoism and hatred; St Paul wrote that it was the zeal for the traditions of his fathers than led him to persecute the first Christians. Traditions should never be taken for granted or left unexamined. Traditions are roses - beautiful and sweet-smelling, but always in need of pruning. But let the gardener prune carefully - you want some roses left for the garden.

When the scribes and Pharisees try to trick and trap Jesus with impossible thought experiments, they often quote their traditions. Jesus always wins the debate. He wins in the face of their traditionalism. He wins by being a radical. RADICAL! His radicalism is not marked by the abandonment of the concept of tradition, but by deep respect for it. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the most famous speech about the importance of tradition - “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times…But I say to you…” - keeping the traditions of God in the face of the self-serving traditions of men. The scribes and the Pharisees are the White Witch to Jesus’ Aslan: ‘“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.”’

Not every critic last week will have genuinely cared about the traditions of the House of Commons. Many will have mouthed the words but would have happily stood by if the breaking of convention benefited them. Nevertheless, we must take tradition, and it’s breaking, seriously. Traditions nurtures the relationships of MPs. Traditions nurture the relationships of neighbours and fellow citizens. Traditions nurture relationship with God, as the traditional rhythms of religious practice and Church seasons help order prayer and worship. Perhaps we’ll look back on the upturning of this particular Commons tradition and recognise it as the right rejection of an outdated convention…but let's be cautious. Traditions are important. Break them with care.

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Education

25 January 2024

4 min read

There’s a blindingly obvious way to teach religious tolerance

George Pitcher disagrees with the media’s approval of a school ban on religious observance.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

school pupils sit at desk, some with a hand raised.

Michaela School pupils in class.

The decision by “Britain’s strictest school”, the Michaela Community School in north-west London, to ban religious observance after a Muslim majority among the children started prayer rituals, which led to some bullying and violence (and indeed a lawsuit), has met with almost universal media approval across the political spectrum.

Nick Timothy, a columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a former spin-doctor for Theresa May as prime minister, predictably used it as a dread warning against an Islamic threat under the headline: “Multiculturism is becoming a Trojan horse for Islamist domination.”

In what some might term as the sensible middle-ground of the Sunday Times, Camilla Long weighed in with an attack on Muslim cultural observance and then posed the extraordinarily illiberal question: “Wouldn’t it be better if we banished faith in schools altogether?” On the left, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian agreed, concluding that it’s “time to abolish religious schools.”

This seems to be the kind of old-school management that said that if you can’t play together nicely, there will be no playtime for anyone.

There’s something cultic about the free school Michaela and its headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh. The right-wing love it for its Gradgrind strict disciplines and consequently high academic results. The left are said to hate it for much the same reasons. And almost universally Ms Birbalsingh is treated as an educational demi-god.

Allow me to demur. The first thing I want to say is something I think is blindingly obvious: You don’t teach children religious tolerance by being religiously intolerant. I don’t usually like to have to coin a truism, but there we are.

The desire to ban is an unfortunate tendency in Birbalsingh. I understand why she might want to ban knives or drugs or porn in her school, as would all schools, but religious observance? This seems to be the kind of old-school management that said that if you can’t play together nicely, there will be no playtime for anyone.

Transposed into the religious context, that becomes: “If you can’t pray together nicely, there will be no prayers.” This grows into an extreme form of secularism, which pretends that there is no religion in the world, when we know that in fact it’s full of religious people. That doesn’t seem to be a good education for our young, if good education is meant to prepare them for the world, which I posit that it does.

I’m with our late Queen Elizabeth on this and, in particular, the profound generosity of her Christian faith.

The next thing I want to say is that it’s incumbent on a decent school to teach that the three Abramic faiths – in order of their emergence, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are in their authentic forms religions of peace.

Anyone who claims that Islam’s holy book, the Koran, is intrinsically violent clearly hasn’t read the the Bible or the Torah. But, in all three instances, human violence and oppression are met with the redemption of an all-loving God.

It follows that the Michaela can and should ban bullying and intimidation, but not the authentic cultural practices of these religions. It might, naturally, simply be easier to ban the lot and be done with it, but nobody has said that running a school is meant to be easy.

In my own experience as a parish priest, visiting a Church of England primary school (the sort that Toynbee, as a good liberal, would ban) for assemblies, is that tolerance and diversity are best taught naturally by practice.

At prayer time, I was gently reminded by the headteacher that I shouldn’t invite the children to pray with words such as “hands together” as that’s not how all families pray (if they pray at all). Better to say: “Let’s get ready to pray, however we do that.” Tolerance in action.

Finally, off the back of talking about a Christian school in a nominally Christian state, I’d like to conclude with how a Christian school (clearly not Birbalsingh’s) should behave. Clearly, evangelising in a multicultural institution is inappropriate. What we should aspire to is pluralism.

I’m with our late Queen Elizabeth on this and, in particular, the profound generosity of her Christian faith. She delivered a speech at Lambeth Palace to mark her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. She started by saying: “The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

She went on to say: “Gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely.” It seems to me that this should be an aspiration that is taught in our schools. Not just the Christian ones, but all of them.

It invites children of other faiths and of no faith to respond accordingly. It seems to be at the heart of an education that teaches how the world actually is, rather than how we fantasise it to be.

And it provides a considerably more valuable lesson for children than the instinct of Ms Birbalsingh and her media cheerleaders to ban things.