Schools in Northern Ireland which teach pupils that Christianity is true are breaking the law. That is the ruling of the Supreme Court, which finds that religious education lessons and collective worship which aren’t ‘objective, critical and pluralistic’ are a form of ‘indoctrination’. It also finds that allowing parents to withdraw their children from these activities, which is already a statutory right, is not enough because doing so might place an ‘undue burden’ on parents or stigmatise the child.

By its very nature, Christianity is an absolute truth claim: Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God who died for our sins

The case involves a girl who, between 2017 and 2021, attended a ‘controlled’ school, a non-denominational institution overseen by a board of governors, funded by the Education Authority, and historically serving Northern Ireland’s Protestants. The girl’s parents are humanists and don’t wish their child, who is now 11, to be raised a Christian. While they profess to have no issue with religious education, they opposed their daughter being taught the tenets of Christianity as objective truths.

They want to teach her instead to be ‘caring, ethical and respectful of all people’. However, they decided not to withdraw her from religious lessons and worship because they feared she would be ‘bullied or isolated’, would interpret her exclusion as a punishment, and would be ‘outed, school year by school year, as a non-Christian’.

Instead, the father contended that the school’s religious curriculum and collective worship should change. He considered it in contravention of Articles 2 and 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 2, Protocol 1 says the state must respect parents’ rights to ensure their child’s education is ‘in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’. Article 9 guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion. The father fired off a complaint to the school, which responded that it provided ‘Bible-based’ religious instruction in line with Northern Irish law.

In 2022,........

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