Many humanists feel a particular moral anger about the foisting of an adult’s personal religious mythology on children as if it were fact. Humanists may appreciate that a given religious parent or teacher is doing what they think is best, that they genuinely believe spoonfeeding religion to children is morally edifying, perhaps even essential for fostering a view of human dignity in their wards. But such views imply that humanists and others without religion are less morally edified or less capable of understanding human dignity, so try as we might to understand and empathise with these motivations, we’re hardly likely to agree with them.

Ariane Sherine and the British Humanist Association launched a new campaign on Wednesday 18 November 2009, calling for an end to the “labelling” of children as religious. Religious labels routinely used of children (‘Christian child’, ‘Muslim child’ etc) are displayed mixed up with labels that most people would bawk at (‘Communist child’, ‘Conservative child’ and so on), the point being that there should be something equally disturbing about the former as the latter.

Humanists often rankle at the warping of a child’s free development. Genuine moral education is one thing, and a very good thing, but coercion toward binding faith in a particular mythological-metaphysical framework is another thing altogether. The Homo sapiens leaf on the great tree of life is capable of an intellectual autonomy and prowess that is unparalleled in the rest of nature. No other species rivals the human in being able to form such complex linguistic concepts, and humanists treasure this Darwinian endowment, want to nurture it, and (see The Billboard campaign – What would J S Mill think?) feel painfully any attempt to undermine and subvert it.

Please Don't Label Me billboard

This is not to say that children can, let alone should, be raised in a vacuum. There are multitudinous cultural and intellectual influences on any child in any society, without which human civilization would quickly collapse. (Without the ‘programming’ we receive by near complete immersion in society, we quickly lose the benefits of our big brains and become ‘feral’, the brain even losing many of the neurological trimmings associated with a healthy human mind.) To say that children should not be coerced toward highly debatable ideological positions is not at all to say that they should be isolated from all possible influence.

It’s necessary to set all this down because the scope of the Please Don’t Label Me campaign was exaggerated by the few critics who took umbrage. Speaking generally, their tactic was to attack a strawman, as if the billboards had been calling for the banning of all reference to religion in the vicinity of children, or even the complete cessation of all education regarding “meaning and values”. The BHA called on these critics to calm down and “take the time to read the adverts and think”.

But the scope of the campaign is a little wider than the singular example of explicitly labelling children. Responding individually to the critical commentators the BHA made this explicit:

Perhaps by extension the wider message is about the general case of “boxing in” or actively coercing children toward a religious or ideological position, for example by:

• telling them they are “born into” a particular religion
• undertaking infant baptism and telling the child they thereby “belong” to a particular religion
• segregating them from children who “belong” to other religions in schools which teach largely about their “own” religion and reinforce the idea that they are innately stamped with a specific creed
• implying a threat if they “abandon” the religion, such as familial disassociation, disfellowship from a community, or indeed more unearthly punishments delivered from on high!

With this in mind, the BHA is also raising money to fund its work on education, children’s rights and against faith schools. You can donate at www.justgiving.com/nofaithschools.

Useful links:

• Information from the BHA on the billboard campaign
• How to help promote the campaign and join in on Facebook and Twitter
• Donate!