Just to add some nuance to this...
RE is the lesson in which pupils are taught about religion. It does not instruct that any particular religious claim is true or false.
And the “daily act of collective worship” is one of those laws that is widely disregarded, to the point where OFSTED inspections will note that schools are not compliant but not mark them down for it. It’s rapidly becoming one of those archaic laws like “the queen owns all the swans” which has very little practical effect on everyday life.
> The Education Reform Act (1988) requires that: -
> 2. Religious Education should be taught in accordance with an agreed syllabus.
> 4. The agreed syllabus reflects "the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian while taking into account the teachings and practices of other principal religions represented within Great Britain". (Education Reform Act 1988, Section 8)
Even if the concepts aren't taught as "truth" it makes things vastly easier for Christian parents to socialize their children in their religion. (Which the U.N. recognizes as a human right.) And it would likely be illegal in the U.S. (Teaching about religion generically would not be, but the provision about the Christian tradition of the UK would likely push it over the line.)
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_worship_in_schools
> Schools with a formal faith designation are required to arrange worship in accordance with their trust deed or, if they have no trust deed, in line with the practices of their designated faith. For schools without a formal faith designation, the majority of the acts of worship should be "of a broadly Christian character". In practical terms, this has been interpreted to mean that 51% of school days each school term must have an act of worship of a broadly Christian character.
Social conservatives in the United States would be thrilled to have laws like the one in the U.K. Obviously a country like the U.K. that's becoming irreligious might not take the legal requirement too seriously. Folks in San Francisco probably wouldn't either. But folks in Iowa would probably take these requirements seriously. Under current U.S. law, schools in Iowa in communities where 80% of people go to Church every week are required to operate like schools in France. (My wife and I once calculated that her little town in northwest Iowa had a church for every 150 people.)
Forcing Iowans to act like the French drives a lot of polarization and resentment. When you hear people complain about the "war on Christmas" that's what they're talking about--stripping away the fact that "the religious traditions in [the United States] are in the main Christian."
The US's leaning on the Supreme Court to make social progress is really a result of its inability to make social progress in sane ways through legislatures. The fact that it took a Supreme Court decision to legalize interracial marriage only two years before the Moon landings should be a source of profound shame on its legislatures.
The situation with slavery and segregation in the United States is unique (and unique legal mechanisms were created to combat the issues). But it's not clear to me that you can generalize from that to other social issues. On homosexuality, for example, the U.S. is between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, and similar to Italy in terms of acceptance. Absent the Supreme Court, many U.S. states would have same-sex marriage in similar time-frames to EU countries. As to abortion, public opinion mirrors the actual laws in countries like France and Germany: support for making it legal up to 12 weeks, subject to things like waiting periods, with strong support for making it legal after that with only limited exceptions.
Sure, some U.S. states would be stragglers, but the same is true in the EU. Ireland didn't legalize abortion until just a couple of years ago. Switzerland and Poland still don't have same-sex marriage. How would the EU react to the European Court of Human Rights taking these decisions away from the state legislatures? Maybe that's what should happen, but this thread is about polarization. It would be polarizing as hell.
The UK does no such thing - education is handled completely separately by the different parts of the UK.
There certainly weren't "daily acts of collective worship" when I was at school in Scotland 40+ years ago and there aren't now when my kids went to school.
Indeed. To provide background for others, by the early 1970s various US states had legalized abortion. In Roe v. Wade, however, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a constitutional right, abruptly legalizing it nationwide with more or less no restrictions whatsoever; even many abortion-rights supporters believe that the legal theory behind the decision was faulty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Legal). The result was so across-the-board that, among other things, the US still allows abortions to occur later than anywhere else.
Preventing the full political debate process from occurring is why abortion remains so controversial in the country almost 50 years and counting. Because such issues are polarizing and partisan, they need full discussion in a legislature, as opposed to unelected judges unilaterally short-circuiting the debate.
The UK makes teaching religion mandatory in public schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_education_in_primary...
> Additionally, all schools are required by law to provide a daily act of collective worship, of which at least 51% must be Christian in basis over the course of the academic year.
This would be unconstitutional in the United States. We are far more religious than the U.K. But our Supreme Court has imposed a public secularism similar to that of France. (Based on an extremely strained reading of the Establishment Clause.) To this day, 2/3 of Americans oppose this 70-year old precedent.
In the UK, you legalized same-sex marriage by law. In the U.S. the Supreme Court found it to be a constitutional right (in a decision that is in my opinion correct as a legal matter, but many disagree). A year later, the European Court of Human Rights reached the opposite result (finding that denying same-sex couples the right to marry does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights) in a case arising out of France. It’s still not legal in Switzerland.
The UK legalized abortion by law. It’s 24-week limit on abortion for economic reasons is the longest in the EU. In the US, abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court. 24 weeks is a fairly typical limit in the US—a country that’s more religious than Poland (where abortion is illegal). The 12-week limit in Denmark or Germany or France, or the waiting periods that were place in France until 2015, would be unconstitutional. Germany’s abortion laws (where the constitutional court found it unconstitutional to legalize abortion so it’s still just decriminalized under 12 weeks, and where there is a counseling requirement) would be unimaginable. Indeed, at the same time as the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to abortion, the courts of Canada, Austria, and France found that it was a matter for the legislature to decide.
You passed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Since it was legislation, you were able to consider and impose a large set of exemptions for specific occupations. (You can’t sue a Catholic Church for not hiring gay clergy.) The Supreme Court just recently held (in a decision I think was correct) that our existing 1960s-era law already banned sexual orientation discrimination.
Our Supreme Court is dominated by our country’s cultural elites. Even the conservatives tend to be steeped in the cultural norms of the coastal urban areas. (The one Justice who is not, and has social views typical of Black men like himself of his age, is demonized mercilessly.) No other developed country puts a highly-educated elite in charge of dictating to the rest of the country how to handle these social issues. This is a huge source of resentment and polarization.