One area in which the religions have always claimed kudos is in the field of ‘Good Works’. From everyday community activities, to the provision of health and welfare at home and abroad, the Churches claim to provide the infrastructure and organisation through which people’s needs can be met. From their role in initiating caring services, their development and reform, through everyday community social activity, the Churches use people’s needs as a way of promoting themselves and their beliefs, while portraying themselves as progressives intent only on caring for the welfare of others. The need for these activities binds people to the Church and has made them dependent upon it. In the field of general social policy and its administration, voluntary schemes and charity are their method of choice. They have dominated communities and, hard as it may sound, there has been a consistent pattern of self-interest in the activities of the Church and religion. Their attitudes to the poor, and ‘sinners’ and their interpretation of biblical texts has often led to cruel and punitive treatment of those who have fallen into crime and loneliness, causing many of the problems that they set themselves up to solve.

In the provision of welfare and health, the religious model has held back progress rather than initiated development and reform. Their conservative attitudes and protection of their dominant position leads them to resist the takeover of these services by secular organisations, preferring to keep ‘their’ services in the private sector of which they are a part. They are often run by people who are uncontrolled and unaccountable until forced by circumstances, finance, or scandal to bow to public pressure to allow examination of their methods and results, and in too many cases the role of abusive organisers and clergy.

As the influence and membership of the Christian Churches declines, they see ‘faith-based welfare’ as a way of reinforcing their position in society. Strong pressure is being put on the government to give them money to run sectarian welfare services, as a retreat from universal provisions free from the many disadvantages of sectarian activities. (See Chapter on Charity and Voluntary work)

The Churches claim the credit for the first health and welfare services. It is often said, quite rightly, that it was the religious people of the past who initiated institutional care of the sick and the destitute. They could do this because they were the only organisations with the resources, people and premises available for this purpose. These services brought gratitude and high esteem from the community, regardless of the fact that they had, apparently, no aim to extend the care and develop it as part of the overall fabric of society. They kept it as a sectarian activity. They made it appear that only religious people and the organised Church could, would and should provide these social services. Also ignored was religion’s own part in creating the problems that led to the need for these ministrations. It was religious attitudes to ‘god’ and ‘the devil’, that led to the casting out of ‘sinners’, the labeling of some people as ‘immoral’ and ostracism of those with disability supposedly caused by god as a punishment, which justified their punitive treatment of poor, ill, disabled and otherwise disadvantaged people that resulted in their abandonment and poverty. Even now antagonistic attitudes to welfare by many people and a general blame culture are built upon a conviction that people are always in control of their circumstances and can change themselves, and such attitudes are based on traditional religious notions of the power of prayer or belief. This is very much a philosophy of goodness being next to godliness.

The religions claim that they were in the vanguard of welfare and care for ‘the fallen’, ignoring the fact that their attitudes were often the cause of the ‘fall’. The concept of the deserving and undeserving poor, for instance, led to mostly harsh treatment of most of the poor, who were, in religious terms, regarded as undeserving — and still are today. Their suffering were either their own fault, or seen as pre-payment for greater reward in the afterlife. If God ordains that some shall be poor and wretched, who are we to interfere?

If challenged on this, the Churches point to the great reformers who were religious and representative of religion, but for every social reformer who recognised the need and was in a position to influence policy and practice, there were the majority who sustained the status quo and resisted change. Religious reformers there were, particularly among the Quakers, such as the Cadburys and Rowntrees. But there were many more religious employers who exploited their workers — mill owners, slave traders, as well as monarchs and generals, squires and land-owners — all upright Christian men. Nor did these pillars of the Church tolerate dissident workers: many were thrown out of work or persecuted as heretics or witches, if they dared to complain or express disbelief in religion. In addition, it was all but impossible for anyone, least of all people of influence, to admit lack of religious belief, so there is no way of knowing for certain to what extent reformers were indeed religious or covert doubters. It is reasonable to suppose that those intent upon reform would think that they stood a better chance of success if they were seen as respected, pious Christians.

Regardless of the social pressures, there were some reformers who conspicuously ignored religion or actively expressed their non-belief: men and women such as Thomas Hobbes and William Cobbett, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. There were also increasingly those who were courageous enough to campaign not only for welfare reform but also for secular humanism itself, people such as the American Robert Ingersoll, Angus Wilson and Marie Stopes. The pressures for social reform throughout the 20th century came not from the religions but through radical politics. Although many radical politicians who fought for humanitarian reform of social policy were not believers, many thought that the priority was to attain their goals, and that to express their atheism would hinder their efforts. Even today, politicians will not expose themselves to the ire of the Church by openly criticising their reactionary attitudes and practices. There are still only a handful of MPs who identify themselves as humanists (the softest term for non-believers) all of whom are in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.

When faced with criticism, the religions point to education, caring and welfare, social progress and reform as ways in which religion has led the way. From the earliest times it was inevitable that being the only organisation with buildings, a pool of people who did not have to work for a master, go to war, or scrape a living in small family units, and had money and influence, they would take on this role. Religion’s province was already the servicing and paternalistic control of the population in order to keep its place at the heart of the community. They were the only organisations that could provide organised care of orphans, the sick, and dying. For these services, the community paid in compulsory tithes. Most of the basic needs, however, were left to individuals and families to provide for themselves, and it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries, as the population increased, that the provision of health and welfare services started to be a serious interest of the state. The poverty and destitution of vast swathes of the population, initially the rural poor, then made much worse by the industrial revolution, reached such levels that eventually writers and philanthropists, reformers, and publicists such as Charles Dickens — ‘troublemakers’ of the day — drew attention to the desperate condition of the poor and it could not be ignored. Their work in changing the horrendous Poor Law that not only did not serve or reform, but made worse the conditions of the poor, has been well documented. Considering its power and all pervading influence, the Church did little to address the needs of the people’s health and welfare during the years in which it could have promoted and overseen gradual humanitarian progress.

Only when welfare provision was taken out of the hands of the Churches did it become professional and non-discriminatory, accountable and free from religious pressures. Yet today, far from going forward to increase comprehensive secular welfare provision, the Labour government is eagerly going along with demands from the evangelical Churches and other religious groups to fund their ‘faith-based welfare’ schemes. They are doing this regardless of the obvious arguments against the sectarian nature of such services from the point of view of both service providers and service users. Discrimination in employment has been conceded to the Churches, and there is no assurance that public funds will not be used for Church promotion, and no assurance that services and staff will be fully accountable, nor any protection against wasteful duplication by competing services.

This is an area of care in which the standards of care have not kept pace with modern notions of responsibility of the community, relying as it does on unreliable family structures.

Of great current concern is the spate of child abuse and child killings. After every case there are prayers, bunches of flowers and Church services, and the howl goes up from the British media, "How can we make our children safer?" The cry also goes up from the Churches and religions against what they call the increasingly secularisation of society, as if it were true that things are worse now that there is supposedly less religion. They jump on any bandwagon taking advantage of any hint of hysteria engendered by tabloid coverage of these terrible events, to urge people to return again to their religions, the panacea for all things wicked. What a cruel deception.

Governments are urged to bring in more and more draconian procedures aimed at assuaging the ‘fear-of-the-stranger’ as it reaches new heights in people’s perception as the greatest threat to our children. In Britain, a country of 56 million people, there are going to be cases of mad or evil people abusing or killing, whatever regulations, registers or legislation are in place; but there are things we could and should do. Unfortunately, these remedies, none of which will prevent every horrendous event, are not the stuff of rhetoric, tabloid hysteria or emotional sermonising, but the grind of rational policy decisions, some of which involve people accepting the burden of financing them.

In a letter to The Observer in September 2002 Professor Colin Pritchard, of the Mental Health Group of the University of Southampton School of Medicine, pointed to four facts pertinent to child killing: that four out of five murdered children are killed within their families and not by a stranger; that serious neglect and abuse also occurs predominantly within families; nine out of ten seriously neglected and abused children are in families living in relative poverty; and Britain has the highest proportion of children living in relative poverty in the European Union. (We also have the highest proportion of under-age pregnancies).

He went on to say "If the media were sincere in their calls to make children safer they would campaign for targeted intervention to break the cycle of intergenerational child neglect and abuse." He could also have pointed out that failure to finance child protection at local level means that children known to be in danger are not protected because there are not enough well-trained social workers to ensure that they have realistic case-loads. The refusal to recruit and train enough good child-care staff for children’s homes, and to pay enough to attract enough good people, puts children already traumatised by family breakdown or illness at further risk from unqualified or otherwise poor-quality provision.

That so much child protection work has to be done by the NSPCC and Kidscape, two secular charities, funded by charity and not national funding, illustrates indifference to rational policies on this issue; and is an indictment of a country where Christianity is the state religion, subscribed to by a majority of the population for so long.

Our social policy is only now tentatively emerging from the influence of the punitive religious attitudes towards one-parent families in general and single mothers in particular. These attitudes reflect the traditional view that the holy state of matrimony is the only ‘right’ and moral way to bring up children. Christian Britain today still does not wholeheartedly consider adequately the financial or community child-care needs of the children in one-parent families, or poor families, Yet it is still common to hear sympathy for single parents who are ‘not to blame’, but women who ‘deliberately’ have children out of wedlock are still seen by many as deserving economic punishment, an imposition that affects both the mothers and their children. Judging by many of the commonly expressed current political views, the notion of the undeserving poor is as strong today as it ever was.

At the time of writing, the government is trying, against a tide of religious prejudice, to pass legislation that would allow children to be adopted by unmarried and same sex couples eager to provide loving homes for them.

Poverty and lack of community support for families is one factor that drives lone mothers to resort to relying on men who want them to fulfill their own needs, but not their children, for whom they must take some responsibility, and with whom they may have to compete for attention. This must contribute to the recognised phenomenon of children abused by transient partners.

The impact of the religious attitude to wrongdoing and punishment, be it for disobedience to secular laws, religious doctrine or biblical injunctions, is worst on women and children. 

Punitive attitudes and demands for retribution, so much a part of the religious agenda, result in reliance on imprisonment as a punishment. Where this is used for people — mothers or fathers — who are ‘more weak than wicked’ and not violent or threatening, it causes considerable trauma and hardship for women and children, when it is not they who should be punished. As usual, it is disproportionately worse for families who are already poor and may not be able to buy other forms of child-care, or travel to visit an imprisoned parent.

Children have always been exploited, and much of this exploitation has been and still is carried out by the Church and its priests, a fact ignored by a new Archbishop of Canterbury in his public statement on being appointed in 2002. He referred to abuse of children — not by priests or paedophiles; not by contaminating their education with religious indoctrination; or abusing their human right not to be physically attacked by adults — but by commerce!

True of course, but less to do with the Church than revelations at the end of the 20th century, from Europe, including the UK, and across America, of sexual abuse of children by Catholic Priests —a scandal the scale of which was played down not only by the Churches themselves but by the British media. Only when Church finances took a hefty knock by having to pay massive compensation to people abused by its clerics did much of the media notice the extent of the problem, preferring to amuse its readers with mildly titillating ‘naughty vicar’ stories.

There is also an increasing awareness of child deaths associated with the ritual killings in Europe by followers of extreme sub-Saharan African cults, the last two in Britain in 2001 and 2002. According to Europol (reported by Tony Thompson in the Observer 1/9/02), there have been at least nine between 1992 and 2002.

There are regular reports of demands by Christian Evangelical sects that harsh punishment of children by parents and in their Church schools should be allowed. And mainstream Christian Church schools, particularly those run by priests and nuns, have a reputation for punitive attitudes towards the disciplining of children and the maintaining of corporal punishment. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ has been more the pattern than ‘turning the other cheek’. The worst excesses are now constrained by the less punitive attitudes of a secular society, informed by educational and psychological research, and the law.

Severity in the disciplining of children has its roots in religion and is at its worst when done with religious zeal, during periods of religious strength, such as the Victorian era, and in institutions such as boarding schools where religious dogma is confused with wise and understanding guidance based on sound psychology.

In Ireland vulnerable children, boys and girls, were subjected to cruel regimes of harsh discipline, physical and sexual abuse in schools run by priests and nuns. This was going on up to the 1960s and was exposed in 2002 with a docu-drama and film, based on factual evidence, of the Magdalene Laundries.

Much abuse of children is deeply rooted in religious ideas, and the notion that ‘naughtiness’ or disobedience is the work of the Devil, ‘little devil’ and ‘imp’ are now thankfully only relics of widespread beliefs from the past that have passed into common language. But there are still too many children in puritanical religious families and their schools who suffer personal violence or social exclusion, caused by their parents’ fanatical religious beliefs that keep them segregated within their immediate family. Unfortunately, too, extreme views that children need severe discipline still persist if the devil in them is to be kept at bay. One of the worst examples was the case of Victoria Climbie, considered in need of exorcism by her aunt and her boy friend, who took her to their Church, the UCKG, shortly before she died, killed by the cruelest torture and neglect imaginable. It is possible, given people’s naiveté about religion, that their Christian piety disguised their wickedness. Belief in god and the devil is still rife, and even the Anglican Church still has priests who practice exorcism, presumably on mentally disturbed adults though hopefully not on children, small mercy!

Politically, it is a mixed picture. In order to regain some credibility, religious people have got together to call for a reduction of third-world debt. Benevolent socialism was spawned by the early nonconformists, and the Catholic Church is said to support ‘the left’. The Church of England has been called,’ the conservative party at prayer’. The hierarchy of the Anglican Church, with its individualistic approach, is still considered a pillar of support for laissez-faire capitalism, which exploits children as well as their parents as workers, providers of cheap labour. The evangelical Churches, Baptists and others make up the right wing ‘moral majority’ that supports the neo-conservatives in the United States, The more religious a country is, the less protection there is for the poor, women and children. Is it a coincidence that the countries in which one sees the greatest poverty — with children starving, scrambling over refuse heaps and working long hours — are also the most devoutly religious?

An example of the supposedly pious devotion to health and welfare can be seen in the activities of ‘Mother Teresa’. This ‘saintly nun’ is revered world-wide for her work in tending the dying of Calcutta, but if you look closely at what she actually did, a rather different picture of the value of her work emerges. Her methods ranged from not urging patients to seek specialist treatment when they needed it, to raising vast amounts of money, which were not spent on building medical facilities, or to run public health programmes, but to give to the Catholic Church to spend on its promotion, and to promote its anti-abortion and anti-contraception propaganda, in a country in dire need of such choices. This was exposed in books by Christopher Hutchins and Aroup Chatterjee. (‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice’, by Christopher Hitchins; and ‘Mother Teresa, The Final Verdict’ by Aroup Chatterjee.)

The religions built Churches in every locality throughout the country with money raised compulsorily from the community. Religion was all but compulsory, and no open dissent was tolerated.

They have therefore this legacy of an infrastructure and organisation through which people still, very often, have to organise their communal activities. The Church can do this because their privileged position gives them considerable financial advantages not available to secular organisations, they and their schools are subsidised though taxation, and by their own exemption from taxes that have to be paid by secular and secularist organisations. This has allowed them to have a dominating influence in every area of the country through their hold on community life, and they can and often do exert subtle pressure on clubs and activities through the display of their promotional material, and insistence on Church affiliation for ‘leaders’ in some cases. Church parades may have largely died out, but Scout and Guide groups still comply with a religious ethos, as do children’s clubs and playgroups, where Church members who are often given preference over secular providers run them. Harvest festivals promote the charity ethic to children, who are now urged to collect tins of food for needy old people who are expected to be grateful for cans of beans. Seasonal celebrations such as Christmas and Easter are celebrated as Christian festivals although they pre-date Christianity. These Christian promotions are often held hand-in-hand with local Church schools which further excludes those who do not wish to take part in religious activities and puts considerable pressure on parents who understandably do not want to exclude themselves or their children from what should be real community celebrations.

Village life even today is often a picture of Church-dominated community life, and anyone not in sympathy with the Church and its aims and objectives must either swallow their feelings or feel excluded from the life of the village. In many villages, this is shared with the local pub, but even then there is frequently such a close relationship within small, close-knit communities that atheists and others who do not want to contribute to the Church-sponsored activities can and do feel alienated and excluded.

Pressures are on the Churches to keep themselves alive by using the present-day needs of the community more than ever. Having little relevance in the ‘supernatural sector’ they have to keep their flagging support by concentrating on ‘faith-based’ welfare and Church schools, as well as chaplaincy of one sort or another. Clerics are ever-present on QUANGOS, committees, and any other voluntary organisation that finds itself in need of people who have the time go to meetings.

They have the time to spend on co-ordination and promotional activities, giving talks on radio, in schools and other organisations, using every opportunity to use community needs for the promotion of their religions.

There is one function that is necessary for harmonious community living that has been taken as the exclusive preserve of the Church. The role of the ‘parish priest’ or ‘local vicar’ is inevitably, in the way it has developed as part of Church structure, a sectarian institution. Yet there is a need for dedicated community workers to fulfill many of the activities of a local priest, but on a non-sectarian basis. As more people drop religious belief, the local vicar’s religious role becomes obsolete to all but his small congregation. As this happens, it becomes clear that there are functions of this ‘office’ that are still desirable for the harmonious functioning of community, at a level up from the individual or family, but below that of the local authority — co-ordinator, facilitator, support worker and ‘general factotum’. In some areas, local councilors who are themselves politically partisan, and should more properly be attending to the policy-making of a council rather than trying to act as unpaid social workers, take some of these activities on.

If the local vicar were to take off the dog collar, stop seeing his role as a religious one, but that of a ‘facilitator’, or community caretaker, and call himself the local ‘Dogsbody,’ he or she could become a real asset to the community. The functions previously assumed to be the role of the cleric — counselor, arbitrator, co-ordinator, befriender — would be valuable to the whole community. If this were done, the religions could share facilities for their religious services, and other activities. It would free up buildings and land, currently under-used, for much-needed community facilities without religious strings being attached to them, or for much-needed housing. It is happening to some extent, but only against rigid religious resistance. For this to happen it would be necessary for the Church to take its crosses and rituals out of the public domain. If their motivation was genuinely the good of the ‘parish’ and the people, this would be possible; but it is not and it cannot, will not, happen because the aims and objective of religion put the worship of their god and Church above the needs of all humans for inclusive community activities. To sweep away the waste and divisiveness of so much Church property and duplicated facilities (much of which is subsidised through tax exemption), and return it to the community, would require a sea change in the traditional attitudes of the Churches and their members which their rigidity of thought is unlikely to allow.

However, if one takes a closer look at all this activity it becomes clear that the way it is done is far from the efficient and effective philanthropy of the supposed intentions. The religious way is to deal with poverty and deprivation through ‘charity’, rather than through considering the just expectations and rights of human beings. That is not to say that there are not religious people who do work through the political process, although today they could do that as well, if not better, without the religion. But it has not been the Church’s way to demanding basic rights in order for people to live a reasonable life, let alone the best that is possible. Their sights have been set very low considering their proclaimed idealism!