Rev. Dr Bernard Randall reported to UK terrorist watchdog, Prevent

I have a theory about Brexit. It seems to me that people who voted to leave the European Union voted for largely political reasons – to do with democratic self-determination; and people who voted to remain did so for largely economic reasons – to do with prosperity and jobs. Of course I’m simplifying here, and both sides claim to consider both, but it seems to me that which set of ideas, which ideology, takes priority determines which way many people voted. And while we can easily discuss facts, and try to find the truth behind factual claims, ideals aren’t true or false in the same way.

And so the problem with the often very heated and unpleasant debate ever since the referendum, is that people haven’t managed to cope with there being two competing sets of ideals – two ideologies. Now when ideologies compete, we should not descend into abuse, we should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbour as yourself means. By all means discuss, have a reasoned debate about beliefs, but while it’s OK to try and persuade each other, no one should be told they must accept an ideology. Love the person, even where you profoundly dislike the ideas. Don’t denigrate a person simply for having opinions and beliefs which you don’t share.

There has been another set of competing ideals in the news recently. You may have heard of the protests outside a Birmingham primary school over the teachings of an LGBT friendly “No Outsiders” programme. In a mostly Muslim community, this has been sensitive, because many parents feel that their children are being pushed to accept ideas which run counter to Islamic moral values. Many in that community are concerned, even angry, that their children are having an agenda, an ideology pushed on them, which is in conflict with their religion.

And in our own school community, I have been asked about a similar thing – this is one of the requested topics, and the question was put to me in a very particular way – “How come we are told we have to accept all this LGBT stuff in a Christian school?” I thought that was a very intelligent and thoughtful way of asking about the conflict of values, rather than asking which is right, and which is wrong.

So my answer is this: there are some aspects of the Educate and Celebrate programme which are simply factual – there are same-sex attracted people in our society, there are people who experience gender dysphoria, and so on. There are some areas where the two sets of values overlap – no one should be discriminated against simply for who he or she is: that’s a Christian value, based in loving our neighbours as ourselves, and God making humankind in his image, male and female, and himself loving everyone equally. All these things should be accepted straightforwardly by all of us, and it’s right that equalities law reflects that.

But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists “to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England,” anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore it’s very existence. You should no more be told you have to accept LGBT ideology, than you should be told you must be in favour of Brexit, or must be Muslim – to both of which I’m sure most of you would quite rightly object.

Now I don’t know about the faith of the person who asked me to talk about this topic. I don’t think he would say is religious, though I may be wrong, but I am aware that there will be a good few in our community who will have been struggling, if they feel they are being told that they must accept ideas which run counter to their faith – or indeed non-faith based reasoning about the world. So I want to say to everyone, but especially to those who have been troubled, that you are not obliged to accept someone else’s ideology. You are perfectly at liberty to hear ideas out, and then think, “No, not for me.”

There are several areas where many or most Christians (and for that matter people of other faiths too), will be in disagreement with LGBT activists, and where you must make up your own mind.

So it is perfectly legitimate to think that marriage should only properly be understood as being a lifelong exclusive union of a man and a woman; indeed, that definition is written into English law. You may perfectly properly believe that, as an ideal, sexual activity belongs only within such marriage, and that therefore any other kind is morally problematic. That is the position of all the major faith groups – though note that it doesn’t apply only to same-sex couples. And it is a belief based, not only on scripture, but on a highly positive view of marriage as the building block of a society where people of all kinds flourish, and on recognizing that there are many positive things in life more important than sex, if only we’d let them be. This viewpoint is recognized by many people as extremely liberating. And it’s an ethical position which could also be arrived at independently of any religious text, I think.

In other areas you are entitled to think, if it makes more sense to you, that human beings are indeed male and female, that your sex can’t be changed, that although the two sexes have most things in common, there are some real, biologically based, differences between them overall. And if you think that, you would be in accord not only with the Tradition of most Christians, and other faiths, but much of the biological and psychological sciences too.

You are entitled, if you wish, to look at some of the claims made about gender identity, and think that it is incoherent to say that, for example, gender is quite independent of any biological factor, but that a person’s physiology should be changed to match his or her claimed gender; or incoherent to say that gender identity is both a matter of individual determination and social conditioning at the same time, or incoherent to make claims about being non-binary or gender-fluid by both affirming and denying the gender stereotypes which exist in wider society. And if these claims, which do seem to be made, are incoherent, then they cannot be more than partially true. Yet truth is important as we try to make decisions about the consequences of these ideas.

And you might reasonably notice that some LGBT activists will happily lie about gender identity being a legally protected characteristic (which it isn’t), and from that observation wonder whether there are other areas where their relationship to truth is looser than might be ideal. But by way of contrast, no one has the right to tell you that you must lie about these matters, to say things you sincerely believe to be false – that is the tactic of totalitarianism and dictatorship. On a more positive note, Christians will want to have a discussion about human identity which focusses as most important on the things we all have in common, rather than increasingly long lists of things which might divide us. At the same time, the Christian concern for truth will be trying to distinguish between false stereotypes and those areas of human interaction which are assisted by the practical wisdom of past generations.

You might be concerned that if you take the religious view on these matters you will be attacked, and accused of homophobia and the like. But remember that religious belief is just as protected in law as sexual orientation, and no one has the right to discriminate against you or be abusive towards you. Remember too that “phobia” words have a strict sense of extreme or irrational fear or dislike, like arachnophobia, fear of spiders, or triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number thirteen – well there’s nothing extreme about sharing your view with the Church of England, established by law, and of the majority of the world’s population who belong to these faiths. Nor is it irrational to hold these views, since they can be based both on secular reasoning and on scriptures – and if, on other grounds, you are sure that the scriptures reflect the mind of God, then they provide the very best reasons possible for anything. But “homophobia” and “transphobia” have come to be used in a looser sense to mean often simply “you disagree with me and I’m going to refuse to listen to you, and shame you to shut you down.” In other words they have sometimes come to be terms of abuse, used in a dictionary-definition bigoted and bullying way. You can safely ignore these uses, although that takes real moral courage, I know.

And you may think that LGBT rights are different somehow, because no one chooses to belong to the varied groups represented by these ideas. To which I would remind you that equalities law does not recognize that distinction – all equalities are in fact equal. And I’d also encourage you to remember that what is under consideration in religious and ethical thought is only the actions and choices we do make. And what it may never have occurred to you to realize – that religious people don’t have a choice about what they are either. So, for example, I can no more wake up one morning and choose not to believe in God, than I can choose to believe that the Moon is made of cheese. I just know it isn’t, and I can’t change that.

So, all in all, if you are at ease with “all this LGBT stuff,” you’re entitled to keep to those ideas; if you are not comfortable with it, for the various especially religious reasons, you should not feel required to change. Whichever side of this conflict of ideas you come down on, or even if you are unsure of some of it, the most important thing is to remember that loving your neighbour as yourself does not mean agreeing with everything he or she says; it means that when we have these discussions there is no excuse for personal attacks or abusive language. We should all respect that people on each side of the debate have deep and strongly held convictions. And because, unlike Brexit, this is not a debate which is subject to a vote, it is an ongoing process, so there should be a shared effort to find out what real truth looks like, and to respect that that effort is made honestly and sincerely by all people, even if not everybody comes up with the same answers for now.

Peregrinus wrote: »

My thoughts are, if you’re having difficulty reconciling these two things, you’re almost certainly going wrong somewhere. These two things should be completely congruent; if you love somebody, of course you’ll respect them. If you find it hard to respect them, that’s more likely to be because you don’t love them enough, rather than because your love for them prevents you from respecting them.

Are we obliged to offer warning and correction if our relationship with them is such that this warning and correction is likely to be resisted, rejected, dismissed? If we really love them, before we start offering warning and correction we need to create the conditions in which that is going to do them some good. If we haven’t done that and it doesn’t occur to us to do it, then offering them warning and correction is likely to be more about more virtue signalling, feeling good about ourselves and validating our own position than it is about doing any good for or to them.

In this particular context, we have an adult - Dr Randall - and a bunch of adolescents. Adolescents are notoriously prone to groupthink, but the group they think with is their peers - other adolescents. Adult authority figures telling them what to think are likely to have a strongly negative effect. So adults offering them “correction and warning” are probably not going to do them a huge amount of good. Which, if you’re concerned to do good for them, is a problem.

This cuts both ways, of course. The backstory here involves a programme in the school which, we infer, encouraged students to adopt particular attitudes towards LGBT people. If this programme were delivered by adults telling the students, in effect, “this is how you have to think, this is what you must believe”, then it will have been exactly as effective as an adult standing up and reading out the Ten Commandments would be - i.e. not effective at all.

Of course, we don’t know how the programme was delivered. We do know what Dr Randall said, and as you point out it wasn’t a “this is how you have to think, this is what you must believe” message at all; it was an encouragement to independent thinking. (In fact, it occurs to me that part of the reason it got Dr Randall in trouble may have been precisely because it was well-judged to appeal to adolescents; it may have found traction with them; it may have been perceived not only as attempting to undermine the programme’s messaging but as effective in undermining it. But that's speculation on my part.)

Effective messaging to adolescents starts by treating them with respect as autonomous decision-makers. Adolescents have a pretty well-developed sense of when you are trying to manipulate them into making the decision that you think they ought to make, and they react to that pretty much as you would expect them to. That’s a real problem if, in fact, there is a particular decision you want them to make. You’re in the ironic position that the most effective way to equip them to make that decision is to be - genuinely - respectful and supportive of their right to make the contrary decision. Only if they trust you in that regard will they pay any attention to anything you have to say about the substance of the decision before them.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Couple of thoughts:

I’ve already said that we know enough about what went on here to be gravely concerned about Dr Randall’s treatment. But we also know that our knowledge is biassed, one-sided. We haven’t heard the school’s side of the story at all, and what we have heard is a definite and intentional attempt to lead us to a particular conclusion. So — very much in the spirit of Dr. Randall’s sermon, in fact — we have to take responsibility for making our own minds up about this, and not simply adopt the conclusion that Dr. Randall or his lawyers would like us to adopt. And that means, at a minimum, not coming to a final judgment until we have heard and considered other perspectives.

On the issue of respect, yes, of course I agree; you should be able to respect people with whom you disagree. And respecting them includes respecting the fact that they disagree with you; you have to respect the view they hold, even if you don’t hold that view yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with their view; just that you have to respect the fact that it is their view.

That’s important because if, on the one hand, you are telling people that they should make their own minds up and, on the other hand, you are assailing their ideas because they have made their minds up to things you don’t agree with and think they shouldn’t have, they are likely not to feel very respected. If I say to you that you should make up your own mind on issues of, say, gender identity, and you do that and the conclusion you come to is that you should accept your trans friends’ gender identities, and that you should express a trans identity yourself, then the logic of my position is that you should accept other people’s trans identities and express your own trans identity, because you should be making up your own mind and not simply adopting my ideas. If I don’t follow through and support you in acting on the ideas you have formed, you will begin to doubt my sincerity when I say that you should make up your own mind.

In this particular context this is a minefield because Dr Randall is a school chaplain and these are students; he is an adult and they are adolescents. So this isn’t an equally balanced relationship; there’s a power imbalance there which means that the students will be particularly sensitive - perhaps over-sensitive - to the possibility that their chaplain, while ostensibly encouraging them to make up their own minds, is actually trying to manipulate them to adopt his ideas, or at least that his respect for their autonomy is contingent on that autonomy being exercised in the way he would like.

And there’s another complicating dimension to this. If I’m a student with a trans friend, I might think - I very probably will think - that how I treat my trans friend affects my friend, and it affects me, but it doesn’t affect Dr Randall and he should totally butt out of the question. But this ignores the extent to which our communities - school, family, parish, neighbourhood, nation, whatever - are constituted by shared ideas and shared values. We are social, relational beings; everything we do has implications for everyone else — no man is an island, etc, etc. How I treat my trans friend has implications for more than just me and my friend.

We live in a culture that values individualism and individual autonomy, and of course adolescents (in any culture) are at a time of life when they particularly value individualism, because they are trying to create themselves as individuals. And this can mask the importance of collectivism and collaboration. The message that "you must make up your own mind" tends to eclipse another possibility, which is that we should collaboratively make our minds together (which is something that goes on a lot, even though we don’t often think of it like that).

Dr Randall is coming from a Christian background, obviously. The Christian tradition is very strong on shared belief, shared faith. There’s a tension within the tradition between top-down formation of shared belief (popes and bishops teach; the church listens/obeys) and bottom-up (the church discerns; popes and bishops articulate what it has discerned) but, however intense their disagreement, people on both sides of that tension are committed to a collective process for belief formation. Radical individualism is a different thing again. If I were to criticise Randall’s sermon, I’d suggest that it’s maybe too individualistic; it doesn’t do enough to suggest to students that they ought to form their beliefs by listening to others; by contributing to a conversation; by seeking shared positions and agreed values. But if Dr Randall did that then - assuming his sincerity - he'd have to commit himself to listening openly to his students and their trans friends, to learning from their experiences, to finding common ground. Because, again, “you have to listen to me but I don’t have to listen to you” is not really a pitch that will win many hearts and minds.