As a blonde-bobbed five year old, I was taken to midnight mass on the auspicious occasion of Christmas Eve on a particularly muggy summer’s night in inner-Sydney.
A friend of my mother’s was singing in the choir, and – ever keen for an educational experience – my mum let me stay up late for this hallowed occasion.
The church was brimming with C and E Christians (Christmas and Easter types – you might be one of them – turn up twice a year for a quick pray, and bingo! – all your sins/trespasses/bad thoughts are absolved). Half way through the service, I leant over to Mum and whispered, “Pop would like it here. They say ‘Jesus Christ’ a lot.”
I guess you could say my family uses the Lord’s name in vain more than in prayer, making me more of an atheist than anything else. Around a third of the Australian population feels roughly the same: we are the irreligious of this great brown land, the second largest group behind those who identify as Christians.
Fast-forward a few decades and I find myself (perhaps unpredictably) a little miffed that my five-year old, attending her local state school, is supposed to sit through an hour of scripture every week.
Good old scripture. It was compulsory in my day, and after a few weeks of going to the Catholics, I declared that I was going to try out for the Protestants – much to my mother’s amusement as she gently explained religion was not akin to a sport.
But I digress. Our public education system is supposed to be secular. Non-denominational. Perfect for us of little faith. Just as I get to take my kids to sport and drama after school, the religious should fit in their worship out of hours.
So I asked the head Kindy teacher about the available versions of scripture for our eager little student, and was happy to hear she could attend ‘multi-faith’ or Catholic lessons.
Given my poor time with the Romans, I asked more about the multi-faith option – keen for my daughter to understand all faiths, rather than holding just a narrow view of one.
Alas, multi-faith was actually code for ‘every-other-form-of-Christianity-lumped-together’, and my hopes for a broad religious induction was dashed.
Isn’t it finally time to teach world religion as a matter of course? With 60 percent of Australians identifying as Christians – they should be using their collective prayer power to preach tolerance and peace with some kind of urgency, as the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ grows ever wider.
Let’s have our kids learn more than nuances of the Lord’s Prayer, introduce them to the Buddhist scriptures, the Tanach, Aboriginal Dreamtime.
Better still, teach Primary Ethics alongside religion – imagine a generation of kids who understood philosophical reasoning before they got to high school.
For now though, as my daughter’s classmates get whisked away to learn about how God created the world, she sits in non-scripture, her soft pink fingers expertly colouring stencils, as she adores to do in her downtime.
Fine, except that she’s supposed to be getting an education.
