Dear Editor,
In your October issue you report that Oldham council is now opening its meetings with Muslim prayers. Your source is Christian Concern, whose website also comments that ‘pluralism is unstable’ since it assumes that ‘all religions are equally good’. May I suggest an alternative view? In the case brought by the National Secular Society against Bideford Town Council, the courts found that councils did not have power to include prayer on the agenda of meetings (though it was in order for councils to conduct prayers before meetings). The courts’ reasoning was that praying is not necessary for the conduct of a council’s business. The Christian Institute, with the support of your paper, campaigned to overturn this. Eventually, just before the 2015 election, the government fulfilled a promise to make this change and empower councils to pray as part of the agenda.
In fact prayer does not appear on the Oldham agenda or minutes, so accordingly, so far, the Muslim prayers in Oldham do not require the authority of the 2015 Act and participation by council members is voluntary. However the 2015 Act leaves it open to any council to put ‘prayers or other religious observance, or observance connected with a religious or philosophical belief’ on the agenda. The risks with this are obvious. Confining this power to ‘Christian’ observance, as Christian Concern demands, hardly solves the problem as it would then require the courts to define what is Christianity. Pluralism is quite sustainable if it means social and political equality for all – and that means separating church and state. Let us urge the repeal of the 2015 Act before it does serious damage.
