It’s time to revisit the potential of religion as a civilising force

I READ recently about an American school principal who found he was prohibited by law from saying a prayer over the public address system at the start of a high school football game. This was on the grounds that the prayer would offend non-Christian minorities.

"As I understand the law," he told the spectators in the stadium, "I can use this public facility to present the merits of killing an unborn baby as a viable means of birth control. If someone is offended, that's OK.

"I can designate a school day as Earth Day and involve students in activities to worship religiously and praise the goddess Mother Earth and call it ecology. If someone is offended, that's OK.

"But if anyone uses this facility to honour God and to ask him to bless this event with safety and good sportsmanship, then federal law is violated. This appears to be inconsistent at best and at worst, diabolical. Apparently, we are to be tolerant of everything and anyone, except God and his commandments."

Although in Ireland we have a Constitution that would prevent such lunacy, the people from the Power to Change campaign would still recognise the scenario, after the banning of their television ads from Irish television stations last week. Power to Change is an ecumenical campaign which encourages people to rediscover Jesus Christ as the true source of human happiness. Their ads feature a number of people, including Ryder Cup golfer Bernhard Langer, who tell how personal relationship with Christ has transformed their lives.

RTÉ, TV3 and NTL all felt constrained to ban the ads because the Broadcasting Act provides that "no advertisement shall be broadcast which is directed towards any religious or political end". At the time of writing, it seems like a version of the Power to Change ad will go ahead, because an exception in the law will allow the promotion of a booklet about Jesus Christ, provided the ad is not directly proclaiming the religious message. It remains ironic however, that political parties can avail of free propaganda broadcasts at election time but the Christian churches may not buy advertising time to put across their message.

Some say the ban on religious advertising is a good idea because the ads could be sectarian. There are, of course, limits to free speech. But sectarianism can hardly be levelled at the Power to Change campaign because it has the backing of the four main Christian churches in Ireland and its ads are airing freely in Northern Ireland where sectarianism really is a problem.

The more persuasive argument concerns the danger posed by certain new religions. If you let Christians advertise their message on the airwaves, where do you stop? Will it be more unsavoury groups like the Church of Scientology next month? Or other cults and sects which promote a harsher gospel than the Christian one? The cure could be worse than the disease, however, if the end result is that religion is seen as an embarrassment to society. "Practise it in private if you must but don't dare show your faith in public," could become the attitude.

A better solution would be to honour the fact that the Irish Constitution acknowledges Christianity as the foundation of our social values. The preamble acknowledges the "Most Holy Trinity" and "Our Lord Jesus Christ". This, admittedly, doesn't accommodate the other great religions. But as the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has argued, all religions benefit when the mainstream religion of a society is respected.

The other options would be to facilitate all religions, cults and sects, which would be dangerous, or to facilitate none, which would be even more dangerous. By banning all religions from advertising we get an anomaly. The main Christian denominations may not advertise a free recipe for happiness friendship with God whereas the "new religions", touters of tarot card readings and online psychics who dabble in the supernatural, may advertise freely.

The sex industry gets privileged as well because it can advertise its new, and highly expensive, cult of body worship without hindrance. A range of seedy phone lines, which promise their own version of friendship to the lonely and sexually frustrated, are now routinely advertised to Irish television viewers.

What all these services have in common is that they promote certain values, but they are shamelessly self-serving and commercial in nature. Power to Change, on the other hand, is not for profit and is funded by voluntary donations.

It seems that, somewhere along the way, we have gone badly wrong. A negative experience of religious leadership, allied with a new post-war hedonism, gave us the idea that religion was a problem. We found plenty of evidence, such as religious-based conflicts, which appeared to support our view.

But many recent surveys show that authentic religious conviction, far from being an embarrassment in modern society, can be a recipe for a happier life. Studies have found that people with religious faith report higher levels of personal happiness, are less likely to break the law, or to get divorced. Even suicide rates may have climbed because of the decline in religious practice, suggest some experts.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks would go even further. When asked if society can be moral without religion, he replied that a society which loses its religion is like an orchestra which loses its conductor. The harmony may continue for a while but sooner or later discord sets in.

We are beginning to see this in Ireland. Solidarity between people is declining as religious values have waned. It's not immediately obvious because Christian values still permeate our laws to a large extent. And Church scandals have distracted us from the overall reality that religion is a force for good.

But already we can see that the departure of the religious from healthcare and education has led to a decline in the way persons are cared for. Ideas of service and self-sacrifice have receded, to be replaced by counting the cost and clock-watching. The elderly and the sick feel they are just numbers in a bureaucratic system, and there has been a steep decline in the number of people willing to give their time to voluntary and charitable organisations.

Respect for people's property declined, too, with the fall of religion. The scandals in business which are now being exposed mostly began in the 1960s and '70s, by which time religious values were losing ground in Irish society. A new generation of fixers and chancers got established in Irish politics, and in the moral vacuum, there was nothing to constrain their greed.

Some people don't like to believe this. They point to the many evils and hypocrisies of old Ireland, and they cite the virtuous atheists and vicious Christians they have known. This misses the point, however, which is that without religion there is no compelling reason to love your neighbour other than as a sort of selfish insurance policy. The morality of "If I'm nice to you then you'll be nice to me" is grand if you're just going on holiday with someone. But it won't do for an ethic to bind a whole society together.

The absence of a vibrant public morality should convince all but the most bigoted of secularists that it's time to revisit the potential of religion as a civilising force in society. And a change to the Broadcasting Act, to allow people like Power To Change to broadcast their message, would be a very good place to start.