I wouldn't say we were free of angst over religion, Connie. For example, we've recently had/are still having an important public debate about the right to wear religious symbols-- sparked off by two key cases: a woman who worked for British Airways and was not permitted to wear a cross on show while in uniform, and another woman who was a classroom assistant who was asked not to wear a Muslim veil which covered her mouth while at work. There's a strong freedom of religion tradition, but there is debate about the outward expression of religion.

Shaw often argued that having an established church was an important factor in keeping England (the term he used) free from religious domination. Establishment, he claimed, made it an essentially secular institution, which as an arm of the state would not have great secular power compared to other departments, but which as a primarily secular power would no longer have the moral leadership an independent church has. A lot of that argument depends on the form of establishment. It obviously does not apply to theocracy, where the state is an arm of the church rather than the other way around.

Too much of the U.S. these days is an unspoken theocracy.

The history of religion in the U.S. is particularly interesting for me because I've got several Colonial ancestors who bucked the system by being unapologetic Quakers in Puritan colonies when it was illegal not to attend Puritan services.

History, she is cool.

Word, Connie.

The concept of church-state division is not really recognised here, at least in the structure of the system

Hmm. That's - well, I see what you mean, but I don't think I'd have put it that way. But I see what you mean.

And, yeah - when your Queen is the Head of the Church - well, maybe that's got something to do with the fact that most people don't go to church. (That and the whole 'hey, let's found a religion based on my wish to marry my pregnant mistress! Yeah! And let's steal all the stuff those bloody monks have got, while we trash their monasteries. Hmm. I liked it when the Pope called me Defender of the Faith for refuting some other guy's protestantism, so I think I'll keep that title. But bollocks to his Church! Yeah! Go me! Somebody bring me another stoop of WINE!' approach to Christianity demonstrated by Henry VIII. Which tends to stop me from taking the C of E terribly seriously as an institution. But that's just me.)

If I didn't take an O level in anything religious, I never got the idea that the government cared what I was taught--Fay, Am-Chau--is that a correct impression?

Well, these days in the primary curriculum RE isn't mandatory. There is a curriculum, and there are schemes of work that most school's follow, but it's very much 'hey, look, here's an interesting religion! These folks do this! Let's make some divali lamps!' rather than trying to inculcate any particular view. I think that school assemblies are less overtly Christian than they used to be, maybe - but I may just be thinking about my High School (which was a private school anyway, and had the following school song:

" Hear the ancient watchword ringing! / Each for all and all for God! / May it nerve and brace our spirits / As we march along life's road. / Each for all, the school's great motto! / Listen to its clarion call! / All shall share in each one's honour! / Shame of one is shame of all! / All for God, so help us Father / Whose we are and whom we serve..."

...Well, you get the picture. So, yeah, I remember assembly involving hymn singing every morning. But then I also remember school uniforms, hockey sticks and mandatory Latin, which also - not so much with the typical UK childhood.)

Evolution, though? That's in the science curriculum. None of this Intelligent Design business.

I also remember school uniforms, hockey sticks and mandatory Latin

Hey, me too!

We had religious assembly every Tuesday. The Christian one was held in the main hall, and the Jewish one in the library off it. I soon started to go to Jewish assembly. Not many people told me I couldn't go (because I wasn't Jewish), and to all those I replied that I wasn't Christian, so if those were the rules I wasn't assembling at all.

I got to go to the Jewish one.

Also, at Christmas over half the school trucked down the way to the church for a religious service. I started refusing to go to that in Lower Fifth, and I remember Mrs. Shaw pushing so that I didn't have to. Unfortunately she had to, and she was no more Christian than I was.

Instead I hung with the Jewish girls, and there were quizzes on Jewish history and stuff. Much more fun.

The school was technically Christian, I guess. Or expected you to default that way. The few Muslim/Jain/Buddhist/etc girls just did the Christian stuff.

We never covered any material on the major Jewish holidays because almost half the school was missing. We also had a compressed Friday that started and ended early to make sure there was reasonable time to get home and get ready before sundown.

That and the whole 'hey, let's found a religion based on my wish to marry my pregnant mistress! Yeah! And let's steal all the stuff those bloody monks have got, while we trash their monasteries. Hmm. I liked it when the Pope called me Defender of the Faith for refuting some other guy's protestantism, so I think I'll keep that title. But bollocks to his Church! Yeah! Go me! Somebody bring me another stoop of WINE!' approach to Christianity demonstrated by Henry VIII. Which tends to stop me from taking the C of E terribly seriously as an institution. But that's just me.

I just bought a board game, called Here I Stand, which covers the period of the Reformation. It's rather delightfully asymmetrical. The players are the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the French, the English, the Papacy and the Protestants. And they all have different goals (the Ottomans are pretty much entirely conquest-and-piracy focused, while the Papacy and Protestants fight over the hearts and minds of Europe, and the Hapsburgs, in addition to their extensive territorial concerns, also get points for exploring the New World). The English player gets extra points for Henry VIII cycling through his six wives in an effort to produce an Edward.

Interesting.

There was a girl in my sister's class in elementary school who was Jehovah's Witness (I think), and she always left the room in the morning when the rest of the class said the Pledge of Allegiance. Other than that, we were never divided up by religion. (Well, except for one awful high school English teacher, and a biology teacher who, when we each had to write a paper on a genetic disease, would always assign Tay-Sachs to a Jewish kid.) Teachers generally wouldn't assign homework over Yom Kippur (though we sometimes had to remind them), but they pretty much ignored most other Jewish holidays. The cafeteria always served fish on Fridays during Lent. There weren't really enough Muslim kids to make Ramadan an issue. (As far as I can recall, there were only two Muslim kids in the school the whole six years I was there.)

I can only recall a few times that religious issues became anything more than a "Huh, you do that? That's interesting." There was one time that a kid on line for pizza in the cafeteria asked a friend (loudly enough for the whole line to hear), "What's the difference between a pizza and a Jew?" The answer was "A pizza doesn't scream when you put it in an oven." (Ouch. That hurt just to type it.) A Jewish kid threw a pen at him, and a teacher who had overheard yelled at the kid who'd told the joke and made him apologize. Another time, some Catholic kids put up signs all over school advertising a CYO event. Several of us complained to the principal, since we'd been told that we couldn't put up fliers for a Girl Scout event because no signs like that were allowed for anything that wasn't school-sponsored. The principal said we were right, they shouldn't have put up the signs, but he didn't make them take the signs down.

(My school was somewhere around 50% Catholic, 30% Christians of other sorts, 5-10% Jewish, and most of the rest Hindu.)

Um. I think I lost the point of this post somewhere a few paragraphs back.

That's - well, I see what you mean, but I don't think I'd have put it that way. But I see what you mean.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if I hadn't expressed it very well.

school assemblies are less overtly Christian than they used to be

For sure. That is to say, if they used to be Christian at all, they now almost never are. At my primary school we had a few overtly Christian things-- like a nativity play-- but I think we spent quite as much time on Eid (we had a large percentage of Muslim children). I missed a chunk of my secondary education, but in the five years I was attending assemblies there I don't think I heard more than two which were religious-- usually there was vague moralising, so if anything we were being pushed towards a sort of wishy-washy unnamed utilitatianism. I always suspected that it was less because it would be offensive to teach Christianity than because not enough of our teachers had a strong enough faith, of any religion, to actually stand up and talk about it confidently, but that could be wrong.

school uniforms, hockey sticks and mandatory Latin

I did have two of these three. But there wasn't even an option to do Latin, which I now rather regret.

Hil, your story reminds me of overhearing two boys discussing a classmate of mine (who, for added irony, would later convert to Islam when his mother started dating a Muslim). The first boy said, "I hate M." The second agreed, "Yeah, he's a Jew." The first added, "And a Nazi." The second concluded, "That's right-- he's a Jewish Nazi."

I concluded that they didn't know what the words actually meant.

I don't recall religion being mentioned once when I went to highschool. No prayer at school. No special privileges for certain religions. No marking religious holidays besides the standard xian holidays of xmas and Easter. No special foods in the tuck shop. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Which is how it should be in a secular state school.

You want religious shit for your child, then you pay the dosh and put them in a religious school. You want your kid in a secular state school, then fuck off with the religious crap and get off your high-horse when it comes to school prayer and bending over for the priest.