The New Fundamentalists
First shown on Channel 4 in March 2006
Rod Liddle investigates the evangelical Christians who tell teenagers that contraception won't protect them and that homosexuality is wrong – and discovers what children are taught in the state schools they run. Julia Bard reports
The mainstream of the Anglican Church, comfortably familiar to Radio 4 listeners and those who pray only at Christmas and Easter, is in decline. But the evangelical wing is growing. It is targeting and recruiting young people and, says and middle-of-the-road Christian Rod Liddle, could make up half the congregation of the Church of England within five years.
In this Channel 4 Dispatches film, Liddle investigates the ideas and activities of Britain's fundamentalist Christians, whose churches buzz with music, dance and American-style preachers who teach that every word of the Bible is literally true.
They campaign to censor artistic works they consider blasphemous, like Jerry Springer, The Opera; they outlaw homosexuality and urge young people to pledge that they will abstain from sex outside marriage. To encourage celibacy, says Liddle, they give teenagers misleading information, telling them that condoms do not offer protection against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Statistics from the USA, though, show that 88% of young people who have taken the pledge to abstain from sex fail to keep it; they are then left in ignorance about contraception and safer sex.
He visits the state schools run by the Emmanuel Schools Foundation (endowed by fundamentalist Christian Sir Peter Vardy): Emmanuel College in Gateshead, The Kings Academy in Middlesbrough and the most recent addition to the stable, Trinity Academy in Doncaster. All three are academies – an arrangement greatly encouraged by the Government, where private organisations or companies pledge £2 million and the taxpayers add a further £25 million to create state-of-the-art buildings and facilities. And though these are state schools, the sponsors are free to adapt the curriculum, are not bound to have a comprehensive admissions policy and have control over the land and other assets.
As Rod Liddle discovered, these three schools teach evolution, for which there is a mass of evidence, as if it were a 'faith position', giving equal weight to the Bible story of the world being created in seven days. The schools are also very strict – parents and former teachers have described them as 'totalitarian'. The parents of children at the Doncaster academy are furious that this extreme religious sect has been handed the job of running their local school and say that students are subjected to humiliating treatment, such as girls being refused permission to leave the classroom to change their sanitary towels.
These parents are not alone in believing that the schools' good exam results are attained, in part, by potential 'low achievers' being expelled on flimsy pretexts. For example, in the first year of its existence, the rate of permanent exclusion at The Kings Academy was 16 times higher than that of any other school in the area.
Those at the evangelical extreme of the church are militant and growing. Rod Liddle argues that, by replacing doubt and debate with simplistic certainty, they are in conflict with Britain's liberal democratic traditions. And while they are entitled to believe whatever they like as individuals, they should not be handed money to run state schools.
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