Journal of Moral Education

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Education for tolerance: cultural difference and

family values

Brenda Almond

To cite this article: Brenda Almond (2010) Education for tolerance: cultural difference and
family values, Journal of Moral Education, 39:2, 131-143, DOI: 10.1080/03057241003754849

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Journal of Moral Education
Vol. 39, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 131–143

Education for tolerance: cultural

difference and family values
Brenda Almond*
University of Hull, UK
Journal
10.1080/03057241003754849
CJME_A_476006.sgm
0305-7240
Original
Taylor
202010
39
brenda.almond@freedom255.co.uk
BrendaAlmond
00000June
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Moral
(print)/1465-3877
Francis
2010Education (online)

Those who would defend liberal democracy in today’s changing world face a new toleration debate.
While we still want to help our children grow up to see the world from other perspectives than their
own, we are no longer as sure as we were that we know what toleration means or what it entails.
Where education is concerned, it seems the focus is on tolerance as an attitude—encouraging people
to be tolerant—but where the public debate is concerned, the focus is narrower. It becomes a ques-
tion of what should be tolerated and what the law should allow or proscribe. But however interpreted,
the underlying unclarity remains and it inevitably affects educational choices. Must we approve as
well as permit? Must we refrain from judgement? Is tolerance something that is due to people them-
selves or does it include their views and opinions? And how should we respond if it should turn out
to be impossible to tolerate one group or view without discriminating against another? In this paper
I discuss two particular aspects of the new toleration debate, both of which involve presuppositions
about personal and family life and religious and cultural identity. These are: (1) the moral and polit-
ical issues prompted by the presence of newcomers in societies with different religious and cultural
traditions from their own; and (2) a new and combative form of secularism within those societies.

Introduction
Most people would agree that education for tolerance is a task for the family as well
as for schools and the wider community. But how should that task be understood?
Perhaps the most obvious way would be to follow a chain of reasoning along these
lines: tolerance is good, discrimination is bad and children should be brought up by
their parents and teachers to respect others, especially those who differ from them in
religion, race or culture and, also, perhaps more controversially, those whose way of
life at a more personal level differs from that of the majority, for example, in terms of
their sexual relationships and their approach to marriage and family life or in their
moral views and conduct. Understood in this way, educating for tolerance raises a
predominantly practical question about how best to achieve this end.
But while I share the ideal of a world in which our children grow up with a sympa-
thetic understanding of others and know what it is to see that world from perspectives

*Philosophy/Humanities, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX, UK. Email: brenda.almond@

freedom255.co.uk
ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/10/020131–13
© 2010 Journal of Moral Education Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/03057241003754849
http://www.informaworld.com
132 B. Almond

other than their own, this is an issue with many dimensions in a time of unpredictable
change and it may be that we need to ask some more fundamental questions. Indeed,
it may be necessary to begin by asking whether we can still be sure what we now mean
by tolerance. Must we approve as well as permit? Must we refrain from judgment?
Can we not condemn what we ourselves think is bad? Or is it wrong even to think in
terms of bad and good? Is moral neutrality the new virtue? Even if we feel we have
answers to these questions, there will be other questions whose resolution still poses
a challenge: for example, to whom and to what is tolerance due? To people them-
selves, or to their views and opinions? And if the former, does the need for tolerance
apply only to those who differ in ways they cannot change, such as race or colour, or
should it be extended also to people’s voluntary choices and decisions? Finally, how
should we respond if toleration presents us with incompatible goals—if, that is, it
turns out that tolerance of one group or viewpoint necessarily means discriminating
against another?
While it is these fundamental issues that are the main focus of this paper, I believe
they do in fact provide a basis for drawing some limited but useful conclusions about
how the family can help in educating for tolerance in the first and more straightfor-
ward sense. But a focus on underlying issues of principle is justified in light of the fact
that two major developments have shifted the moral and ethical ground in the toler-
ation debate in the last few years. The first of these has been the practical impact of
large-scale movements of population groups whose religious and cultural patterns
mark them out from the community they are seeking to join. Diversity itself would
not be a problem for advocates of toleration—quite the contrary. But the challenge
comes when rapid demographic change places the advocates of tolerance in a minor-
ity within some specified boundary and its avowed opponents in a majority. This is
the dilemma that lies behind a number of recent disputes. Some of those who have
come to European countries from predominantly Muslim countries have found
themselves at odds with their fellow citizens over matters they consider crucial. They
find they are living alongside people some of whom subscribe to other faiths and
others who reject religion altogether.
The second challenge has come not from outside, but from within some of the
Western democracies. This is the rise of a militant form of secularism, which places
itself in deliberate confrontation with all mainstream religions. Originally part of a
historic philosophical debate about the existence of God, the current secularist
agenda has shifted to issues about lifestyle and conduct. In some cases, its conclu-
sions are incompatible with deeply-held beliefs about personal and family life that are
based on religious teaching. Indeed, it may go further than this, creating a gulf
between the family and the state by insisting that, as a matter of formal educational
policy, schools impose on children a view of how toleration is to be interpreted and
applied that has been centrally determined, not by teachers themselves, or by parents,
but by the state.
Here the clash is not between religions but between, on the one hand, a ‘secularist’
viewpoint and, on the other, a religious perspective shared by a number of main-
stream faiths. This is a complex area and it opens up a many-sided debate but I will
 Education for tolerance 133

try to resist the temptation to stray from the broad central questions and, as far as
possible, restrict what I say to the issue of tolerance as it affects, or is affected by,
family and personal life.

Tolerance and the personal world of the family

Tolerance has been a central pillar of the Western cultural heritage, from its first
expression by the Athenian statesman Pericles in the fifth century BC to the modern
re-flowering of the notion in response to the religious persecutions of the seventeenth
century and, finally, to contemporary disagreements about the respect due to
conscience and to those individuals or groups whose religious and moral beliefs
conflict in important ways with the cultural norms of Western liberal societies.
One Western country that has long been regarded as a beacon of toleration and
admired for its acceptance of religious difference and for the welcome it has given
over centuries to strangers and victims of persecution, is the Netherlands. Sadly,
while the issues may have changed and presuppositions may be different, recent
events in the Netherlands call to mind the struggles of earlier centuries. Many of these
are presuppositions about family and personal life and they have highlighted in an
unprecedented way the connections between sexual mores, gender roles and family
values based on religious belief. They have exposed, too, the link between all of these
and the ethical and political demand within liberal societies for freedom to debate the
issues publicly and air them in the media without interference or restriction. Today,
however, tensions in ideas about sexuality, gender roles, family structure and modes
of reproduction mean that these are increasingly seen less as private choices and more
as expressions of cultural and religious identity, reflecting deeper political and philo-
sophical concerns. The appeal for tolerance has traditionally been raised in response
to intellectual and doctrinal aspects of religious conflict, but religion is not something
that can be cut adrift from society and community. It typically embodies a whole way
of life and the views people have about relationships, marriage and family are an inte-
gral aspect of this.
It is hardly surprising, then, if conflicts that centre on the family are sometimes
confronted within the family. It was flight from her family and its demands that
prompted the former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali to break with her background and
to reject her family’s assumptions about her own life. Ali was born in Somalia and
brought up as a devout Muslim. Faced with a marriage she was unwilling to accept,
she eventually found refuge in the Netherlands where she expressed her protest
through writing and film-making. Her film Submission, which featured the domestic
oppression of Muslim women, was illustrated by some highly contentious images.
Seen by some as sacrilegious, the film’s release was followed by the murder in
Amsterdam of its Dutch director, Theo van Gogh.
How to respond to such cases and to the broader and less dramatic challenges
affecting daily life, such as the wearing of headscarves or religious symbols, is a matter
of continuing controversy and it is hardly surprising that parents and teachers,
entrusted with the task of educating for tolerance, struggle to respond. Freedom
134 B. Almond

matters and tolerance is a key value of Western political democracy. But it is also
important not to overlook the impact of private choices on society and community.
So where does the balance lie? What does educating for tolerance mean? In looking
for an answer, it is worth taking a brief backward glance at an earlier stage of the toler-
ation debate. This has its roots in John Stuart Mill’s famous defence of individual
liberty.

Mill’s heritage and its modern critics

Mill’s classic essay, On liberty, was published in England in 1859. In this essay, Mill
offered a reasoned argument for liberty and toleration, for resisting what he called
‘the tyranny of the majority’ and for setting the limits of liberty only where one
person’s liberty could bring harm or hurt to somebody else. Mill summed up his key
principle in these much-quoted words:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering
with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.…The only part of the
conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns
others.…Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. (Mill,
1859/1954, pp. 72–73)
Mill’s essay provoked immediate controversy—a controversy that spilled over from
the late-nineteenth century into the twentieth.1 One of its strongest critics in the mid-
twentieth century was the British judge and legal theorist Patrick Devlin. His public
opposition was in response to the Wolfenden Report—a publication that endorsed
Mill’s separation of the areas of morality and law and led to important law reforms
relating to private sexual behaviour, including the decriminalisation of homosexuality
and prostitution.2 In challenging this, Devlin’s was one of the few voices in recent
times to question the liberal notion that the primary purpose of law is the protection
of individuals. He insisted that the law exists also, and perhaps mainly, for the protec-
tion of society, i.e., to protect the institutions and ideas that are essential for its
successful functioning. Not to be overlooked, however, is the fact that Mill himself
was not an unqualified advocate of individualism. As Kwame Appiah (2005)
observed: ‘though Mill seems to celebrate the ideal of personal autonomy, he did not
generally seek to enlist the coercive powers of the state to foster it’ (p. 31). Indeed,
Mill did elsewhere explicitly recognise the social importance of rules, and hence
implicitly of institutions, when he said that justice itself is ultimately grounded in
social utility. As he put it: ‘Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules, which
concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore of more
absolute obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life.’ (Mill, 1861/1954,
p. 55). So when Devlin insisted that certain social institutions are the moral under-
pinning of society, he may not have been as far from Mill in his thinking as his critics,
and indeed he himself, supposed. Devlin’s emphasis was on the Judaeo-Christian
conception of marriage as a historic institution whose sheer longevity and general
acceptance gave it both a practical and a moral justification. Together with this view
of marriage lay a belief that the law of England is in the end founded on moral
 Education for tolerance 135

principle and that any breach of the standards of behaviour required by society is an
offence, not merely against the person who is injured, but against society as a whole.
The essence of his argument was this: ‘What makes a society of any sort is community
of ideas, not only political ideas but also ideas about the way its members should
behave and govern their lives; these latter ideas are its morals…without shared ideas
on politics, morals, and ethics no society can exist.’ (Devlin, 1965b, pp. 9–10).
But if, as I have suggested, this claim is less radical than it appears, Devlin’s further
claim that popular morality should be the arbiter of law, is more radical than it
appears. Its basis is Devlin’s historical perception that once society had sloughed off
its belief in a monarchy imbued with divine authority, the new basis for governance
had to become the will of the people. He believed, though, that the popular will
would emerge from popular morality—a common ethical perspective. He also held
that, whatever its current basis, this common ethical perspective was originally based
in belief in the God of the Bible. It was this—the ordinary person’s innate conception
of right and wrong—that he saw at work in the jury system and he believed he had
found a definition for it in the words of another legal authority: ‘a blend of custom
and conviction, of reason and feeling, of experience and prejudice’ (Rostow, 1960,
p. 197, as cited by Devlin 1965b, p. 95).
It is hardly surprising, then, that Devlin saw religion, law and marriage as insepa-
rably linked. And, for him, it was an inevitable next step to argue that, like many of
society’s institutions, marriage law binds non-Christians just as much as Christians
simply because it is an institution of this society. As he put it:
It has got there because it is Christian, but it remains there because it is built into the
house in which we live and could not be removed without bringing it down.…A non-
Christian is bound by it, not because it is part of Christianity but because, rightly or
wrongly, it has been adopted by the society in which he lives.…if he wants to live in the
house, he must accept it as built in the way in which it is. (Devlin, 1965b, p. 95)

Despite this strong statement, Devlin’s views on religion were not theologically
driven. His approach to religious doctrine was undogmatic and his arguments were
consciously addressed to progressive thinkers: ‘The question for the social reformer
is not whether Christianity is right or wrong but whether it is dispensable. If he has
his feet on the ground, he knows that it is not.’ (Devlin, 1965b, p. 84). Views on these
matters have changed since Devlin wrote those words, but the questions he raised still
dominate the contemporary debate about tolerance and they have a new resonance
in relation to the two issues identified earlier, one of which comes from outside the
established Western communities, the other from within. These two issues need to
be discussed separately since they raise very different considerations, but it will be
useful to begin by looking first at the impact of the external challenge on the tolera-
tion debate.

New communities and the toleration debate

In a number of historically Christian countries, in which the right of minorities to
worship as they choose is generally unchallenged, but which until recently would
136 B. Almond

have conformed in terms of morality, law and institutions to Devlin’s description,

there are now substantial groups who subscribe to other religions and to cultural
norms that differ from those of the majority of the original population of those coun-
tries. Of course, newcomer faith groups are not necessarily internally homogeneous
and may well include members who have different interpretations of their own
religion and conflicting views about how to practise it. If those internal disputes are
more doctrinal than practical, conflict between the newcomers and the established
community often results from what may be called ‘way of life’ issues: in particular,
religious and cultural views about sex, relationships, marriage, family and the role of
women.
The host societies of Western Europe, too, have divisions, not only within faith
groups, but within the wider community as well. Often described as being in a ‘post-
Christian’ phase, many Western countries, and Britain in particular, present a picture
in which marriage as a basic family structure is visibly on the retreat as cohabitation,
separation and divorce expand to fill the void created. The UK provides a model of
how life has changed. In Britain in 1979 children under 16 were mostly to be found
living with their two married parents. The figure then was over 80% but by 1992, just
over a decade later, the figure had fallen to under 70% (Dennis, 2000, p. 74). The
legal theorist Antony Dnes (2002) commenting on official records of falling marriage
rates, describes the move towards cohabitation in North America and many Euro-
pean countries between 1960 and 2000 as a hugely significant shift in social behav-
iour (p. 119).3 This picture is not peculiar to Britain, although the UK does have one
of the highest cohabitation rates in the EU, as well as the highest incidence of sepa-
ration and divorce.
In a period when change and choice have become popular concepts, men are
increasingly preferring to avoid the commitment signalled by marriage and women
may find it difficult to reconcile the claims of family and domestic life with the real
possibility of restructuring their lives to focus on a creative or business role. For those
who do marry, divorce rates are high, leaving children to cope with the emotional and
personal consequences of parental break-up. Many researchers have commented on
the apparent breakdown in Western countries of important cultural constants, partic-
ularly marriage (Gallagher, 2001) and others have provided ample evidence of the
adverse effects this has had on children’s lives (Amato & Booth, 1997; Wallerstein
et al., 2000; Kiernan, 2003; Wallerstein, 2003). Across these and other important
areas of social and personal life, scepticism and relativism are common and ‘being
non-judgmental’ is confused with tolerance and mistaken for virtue.
At the same time, and even more destructive, the Western tradition is facing a
barely recognised and largely unacknowledged struggle for the very notion of family,
in face of a new politically-imposed ideology of family relationships, the aim of which
is to replace a biological understanding of family with a social and legal construction
of partnership and parenthood. This not only brings divisions over marriage, sexual
conduct and the roles of men and women, but also over artistic freedom, freedom of
speech and openness of debate. Nevertheless, there is a still recognisable gulf, now
gaining increasing practical importance, between, on the one hand, the European
 Education for tolerance 137

pattern of family life and, on the other, one rooted in Islamic traditions. Despite its
currently weakening hold, the former is rooted in Christian culture and history and
is today generally associated with respect for the role of women and a demand for
their equal treatment and rights. The latter may continue to reflect the kind of Islamic
tradition which, in some countries governed by Islamic law, means that women are
restricted to a wholly domestic role—often one that precludes education and access
to a wider public life. But while the skirmishes mentioned earlier—Muslims and
scarves, Christians and crosses—may be dismissed as being more about symbols than
principle, the same cannot be said where forced marriage or honour killings are
condoned or even mandated or where female education is proscribed.
These, however, are highly generalised images and neither, whether European
Christian or Eastern Islamic, tells the whole story. In various Asian and Middle
Eastern countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Iran, Islamic movements that
promote the cause of women and advocate female education can be traced back over
at least a century (see Badran & Cooke, 1990). These did not generally involve relin-
quishing a religious perspective in favour of a secular one but, rather, placing a liberal
approach to issues concerning women and family life within religious belief and
practice—an approach that would not set it significantly apart in practical terms from
that of Christian communities and other religious groups in Western societies.
Today, however, Western countries are themselves riven by disagreements that are
deeper and more explicitly ideological than debates that focus on behaviour. These
divisions have affected not only those who are either sincerely, or at least nominally,
Christian, but also people who reject organised religion altogether. This is the reason
why I see a militant form of secularism, which nevertheless gives lip-service to toler-
ance and opposes discrimination, as the second challenge to the toleration principle
in its historic form.

The secularist challenge and the toleration debate

To understand this challenge, it is necessary to bear in mind that in the past the reli-
gious differences afflicting European countries were, with the important exception of
recurring persecution suffered by Jews, differences between various forms or denom-
inations of the Christian religion. Today this is no longer the case and an increasing
role is played not only by conflict between Christianity and other faiths, but also by
conflict between all faiths and their secular opponents. This has had a strange
outcome: a paradoxical inversion of the toleration principle and the systematic legal-
isation of one kind of discrimination in the name of preventing another.
To see how this peculiar transposition has occurred, it is worth looking beyond the
European setting to a country that takes pride in its defence of liberty, the USA, and
to an organisation for whom such matters have a particular importance, the American
Philosophical Association (APA). Concerns having been raised by some members
about what they saw as the discriminatory educational and administrative practices
of academic institutions with a religious affiliation, the organisation has adopted a
non-discrimination statement in which it condemns as unethical all forms of
138 B. Almond

discrimination (APA, 2009). However, it also wanted to recognise the special

commitments and roles of institutions with a religious affiliation. These aims were
brought together in this statement, which allows religious affiliation to be a criterion
in various professional activities, such as graduate admissions and employment, so
long as the religious affiliation itself does not involve discrimination against persons
according to the other attributes listed in the statement. The attributes listed were
race, colour, religion, political conviction, national origin, sex, disability, sexual
orientation, gender identification and age. The striking aspect of this is its inherently
contradictory nature—indeed one reminiscent of the famous paradox of the ancient
Cretan thinker, Epimenides who, in declaring ‘All Cretans are liars’, defined his own
statement as false. The paradox involved in the contemporary version is that, while
discrimination on any of the listed grounds, including religion, is banned, several of
the banned categories are themselves of religious importance. For example, the state-
ment implies that being an atheist, or holding views opposed to the religious aims of
a particular educational institution, are not reasons for discrimination in employment
or admission to courses at that institution. At the same time, however, it legitimises
discrimination against those who believe, on religious grounds, that they are incon-
sistent with the institution’s aims and raison d’être and so should be disqualifying
factors.
While the contradiction in the APA statement is perhaps more theoretical than
practical, a number of cases in the UK reveal how this confusion can affect indi-
viduals in real life situations. Examples have included the suspension of a nurse on
the ground that she had violated principles of equality and diversity by offering to
pray for a patient she was caring for4 and the barring from further employment of
an experienced foster parent because a Muslim girl in her care had chosen, when
she reached the age of 16, to become a Christian.5 Again in England, a new code
of conduct for teachers (General Teaching Council, 2009) requiring them to be
active in challenging discrimination and to promote diversity in all their profes-
sional relationships and interactions poses a challenge for any teachers who have a
principled objection to homosexuality as a practice, whether or not they accept it
as a matter of orientation. For those with a specifically Christian commitment who
interpret their faith in this way, this could have the effect of forcing them to choose
between their profession and their conscience.6 Parents, as well as teachers, can be
drawn into this controversy. In one incident, parents of about 30 children in an
East London school were warned that they faced the possibility of prosecution for
keeping them at home to avoid a compulsory week of special lessons to highlight
lesbian, gay and transgender partnerships.7 The aim of the authorities was, of
course, to promote tolerance in their schools and to teach children that everyone is
of equal value. And who could object to this? But the protesting parents, who
included both Christians and Muslims, did, rightly or wrongly, object to this way
of viewing the matter and, if they had indeed met with court action, which could,
in Britain, lead to a prison sentence, this would have been the ultimate demonstra-
tion that their views on this matter, whatever their basis, were regarded as beyond
toleration.
 Education for tolerance 139

As these cases show, the transition from the pre-Wolfenden position, when society
punished as a crime private conduct of which it disapproved, has progressed to a point
where disapproval has itself become a crime. How can this have happened in countries
like Britain and the USA in which tolerance and liberty, especially freedom of religion
and freedom of thought and of speech, are amongst their highest political ideals?
How is it that the generalised principle of toleration of diversity (non-discrimination)
can result in criminalising religious and moral objections to a practice? However it
may have come about, the fact is that tolerance has been turned on its head. What is
more, education, together with the principle that a child’s upbringing is primarily a
matter for parents and family to determine, has been dragged into the forefront of
debate.
These remarks are not intended as a challenge to gay and lesbian recognition and
practice. They are, rather, intended to point to the way in which even the worthiest
ideals may be incompatible with each other—that in some cases, it may not, after all,
be possible to tolerate one thing without discriminating against another. Sometimes
the clash is directly with religion, in others it is more indirect—incompatibility with
an important aspect of religious teaching. The family as a naturally procreative unit
is one such ideal that is regularly caught up in this confusion. And yet although some
people, whether for religious or broadly social reasons, have explicitly turned their
back on it, the traditional family is not only of key social importance, but is also
deeply linked to some of the most important and life-shaping aspects of religious
belief and practice.
The cases I have described are signs of the emergence of an increasingly power-
ful form of secularism that is not only intolerant of religion but also of its embodi-
ment in particular ways of life, including family life. As far as education is
concerned, it involves claiming for the state a right to replace parental values,
which may favour traditional family life, with an approach to children’s moral
education that is directed by its own experts and ethical advisers and based on
quite contrary ethical assumptions. By and large, the ground on which these advis-
ers promote tolerance is not that tolerance has value in itself, but simply the belief
that no way of life is any more valuable than any other. Increasingly in the UK, this
is the officially favoured approach to religious and moral education and forms the
context in which teaching for tolerance takes place. But many people do believe
some ways of life are more valuable than others. Indeed, that is why the issue of
moral education is important and is also the real reason why it is necessary to teach
the value of tolerance.
In the examples I have cited, it is Christian belief that has been the target of attack
and it is noticeable that other religions tend to be accorded rather more tolerance.
Voltaire is often cited as the standard-bearer for toleration and, if we follow him, we
will, of course, want to stand for the right of dissidents, atheists and unbelievers to
express their views. But today there is a need for a new Voltaire, someone whose task
must surely be to urge unbelievers to stand, as he did, for the rights of religious
communities and individuals—including Christian ones—to live and speak according
to their conscience.
140 B. Almond

Of course, secularism does not need to take this aggressive form. It is possible to
be non-religious without being anti-religious and while some secularists are oppo-
nents of religion in all its forms, others are not. The problem lies with the form of
secularism that is essentially intolerant of religion and also intolerant of any disagree-
ment with its own ‘way of life’ agenda, for its ultimate endpoint is a place where it
risks opening the door to a new era of Christian persecution.

Finding a way forward

This is not to say that the contest between religion and secularism is a necessary and
unavoidable element in the debate about the family. For that debate is not really
about religious doctrine, but rather about the perennial concerns of the reflective
human person—the struggle for personal happiness and self-fulfilment and the
connection between that and the need to enter into and carry out commitments that
affect the personal happiness and fulfilment of others. This means that the conclu-
sions reached from the perspective of religion on these matters, at least within the
Judaeo-Christian tradition, can be reached, too, from a viewpoint many would in fact
describe as ‘secular’—that is, relying simply on reason and on a commonly accepted
morality that takes as its goal the common good. It is here, I suggest, that we need to
seek the middle ground between, on the one hand, oppressive and uncompromising
cultural or religious constraints on individual lives and, on the other, an equally
oppressive and uncompromising secular re-shaping of ancient beliefs and assump-
tions about family and personal life.
I have argued that cultural identity is closely involved with differing family norms
and different conceptions of what the family is. But I believe we should also recognise
the historical fact that some of the divergent approaches to sexual and family life that
are a familiar feature of today’s Western societies came about only very recently.
Others, particularly those that form the cultural assumptions of people who come
from parts of the word where family life and religion still form a seamless web, often
reflect values that would have been taken for granted by all but an élite group of the
rich and the intellectually venturesome living in, for example, Europe or America at
the beginning of the twentieth century. It is easy to forget that only a few generations
separate us from a time when views about conduct, modes of dress, male and female
modesty and public display in publications and art would not have opened up such a
wide gulf between communities.
I have also suggested here that there is an influential and militant form of secularism
that seeks to conceal its fundamentally anti-family ideology under a newly-constructed
language of parenthood and relationships that omits any reference to gender or
biology.8 However, it has not yet succeeded in completely stifling the ordinary
person’s intuitive sense of what the family really is. This deeper sense of family is still
alive, not only within most religious groupings, but also in the lives of many ordinary
citizens who do not own to any particular ideological perspective. For the familiar
concept of the family as a man, a woman and their joint offspring is something that
can find as much resonance in the thinking of open-minded secular thinkers as in the
 Education for tolerance 141

assumptions of those who take their guidance from a religious text. Tolerance of those
living outside the framework of the natural family, and indeed the kind of acceptance
and understanding that goes beyond toleration, can coexist harmoniously alongside
a belief that personal and social choice is best guided by moral norms—while recog-
nising that these norms are themselves a legitimate ground for discussion and debate.
Understood like this, toleration remains a universal value that it is right to promote
both in home and school. It cannot and should not be carelessly replaced with the
value relativism which has become a tacit assumption of public comment and politi-
cal policy in many parts of the Western world and which is underpinned by the claim
that no-one knows what is right or wrong. This officially sponsored moral neutrality
is unacceptable for the sound reason that it confuses relativism with tolerance, and
tolerance with indifferentism.

Tolerance within the family

To return briefly to the question of the practical role of the family in educating for
tolerance, I believe that in the light of some of the considerations highlighted here,
we would do best to look for an answer to this question in the notion of democracy.
It would not be unreasonable to start from the assumption that democracy and toler-
ance go hand in hand and that a family that is democratic in the way it deals with its
problems is more likely to flourish than one that is authoritarian. By a democratic
family, I mean one in which embedded expectations are subject to challenge, or at
least to a demand for explanation. This throws further light on the paradox created
by the APA statement mentioned earlier. For if they meet this important condition,
parents with firm commitments and beliefs, whether religious or more broadly ethi-
cal, are not being authoritarian when they seek to pass these on to their children. The
state, on the other hand, risks becoming a parody of the worst type of authoritarian
family, when it outlaws even discussion of divergent opinion and when it insists on
the promotion of its own preferred ethical opinions, controversial though they may
be. In these circumstances, and especially when it constrains free speech in the name
of human rights, the state itself takes on the role of the patriarchal parent who will
not allow his views to be subject to scrutiny.
Currently, legislators and educators who deliberately or thoughtlessly ignore these
considerations, create an inevitable conflict for religious believers, forcing them to
choose between compliance and conscience, especially where matters of family and
sexual relationships are concerned. In insisting on unqualified compliance in matters
where there is reasonable moral controversy, the state is demanding that its own
moral conclusions should be imposed on everyone. Many of the most controversial
cases, however, could be resolved by applying as a simple rule-of-thumb the principle
that people should not be forced to do or to advocate what they believe to be wrong,
unless the issue is one where not doing it would itself be wrong.
These, however, are abstract—some would say, academic—arguments and in
general, where it would be possible for dissenters to argue their case on practical
rather than religious grounds, as is the case with many of the most contentious
142 B. Almond

‘family’ issues, it would be better, and also more likely to lead to a satisfactory
outcome, if they were to do so. But it should be recognised that many ‘faith perspec-
tives’ are in the end rooted in the recognition of the reality of the natural family, quite
independently of any views their members may have about the morality, or religious
permissibility, of different types of adult sexual relationships. It seems to me that the
new challenges I have discussed here go beyond this simple factual observation and
risk the creation of a new Leviathan—a state that, whether religious or secular, sees
the family as its rival for the hearts and minds of the next generation of citizens. From
whatever direction this pressure comes—doctrinaire religious leaders or dogmatic
secularists—the liberal democracies must curb this tendency if they are to maintain
the family’s role as an important locus for passing on the values of tolerance and trust
that are part of a truly liberal society.

Acknowledgement
An earlier version of this paper was presented to a plenary session of the 2009 confer-
ence of the Association for Moral Education held at Utrecht University on 4 July
2009.

Notes
1. One of Mill’s first critics was James Fitzjames Stephen, whose book Liberty, equality, fraternity
was published in 1873.
2. Wolfenden, J. (1957). Devlin’s comments were first made as the Maccabaean Lecture to the
British Academy in 1959 under the title ‘Morals and the criminal law’ and later published in
Devlin (1965a, pp. 1–25).
3. Dnes (2002) reports that in England, over the 40 years from 1960 to 2000, first marriages fell
from approximately 70 per 1000 to 30 per 1000 of the male population, while the proportion
of women aged between 20 and 50 who were cohabiting trebled.
4. North Somerset Primary Care Trust cited the Nursing and Midwifery Council code and the
requirement for a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity. See Nurs-
ing and Midwifery Council (2009, November), Joint equality scheme (pp. 2–3), available online
at: http://www.nmc-uk.org/aDisplayDocument.aspx?DocumentID=7283 (accessed 28
December 2009). Following media publicity, however, the nurse, Caroline Petrie, was subse-
quently offered reinstatement. See Gledhill (2009) ‘Victory for suspended Christian nurse’,
The Times, 7 February, available online at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/
article5675452.ece (accessed 28 December 2010).
5. Neither the foster-carer nor the teenager can be named here as they are jointly taking legal
action. Their case is being represented by Nigel Priestley, a lawyer who specialises in care
disputes. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4559867/Christian-foster-
mother-struck-off-after-Muslim-girl-converts.html (accessed 1 January 2010).
6. David Booker, a worker in a Christian hostel, was suspended for ‘seriously breaching’ its code
after telling a colleague he was opposed to same-sex marriage and homosexual clergy (‘Hostel
in gay dispute’, The Times, 13 April 2009, p. 8).
7. For details of the Waltham Forest case, which did not in the end reach the courts, see ‘Parents
face prosecution over ‘gay’ education class protest’, Times Online, 7 March 2009, available online
at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5863871.ece (accessed 1 January 2010).
8. I make a fuller case for this in Almond, B. (2006).
 Education for tolerance 143

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