WITH ITS images of bouncy, grinning youngsters and bright, child-friendly text, Northern Ireland's first humanist advertising campaign makes atheism look as much fun as a trip to the zoo. "Please don't label me," runs the slogan on the billboard in Belfast city centre. "Let me grow up and choose for myself.", writes FIONOLA MEREDITH
The point of the campaign is to persuade parents to stop attaching religious labels to their children. Sponsored by outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins and the British Humanist Association (BHA), the billboards are an extension of the “atheist bus campaign”, in which messages on double-deckers across Britain breezily announced: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The new billboards also appear in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – the Belfast campaign has generated most controversy, and accusations of arrogance and hypocrisy are flying.
Free Presbyterian Church minister, Rev David McIlveen, said it was none of the British Humanist Association’s business to tell people how to bring up their children: “It is the height of arrogance that the BHA would even assume to tell people not to instruct their children in their religion.” As far as Sheikh Anwar Mady of the Belfast Islamic Centre is concerned, the campaign is redundant from the outset, because he does not accept its premise of free choice: “We believe that every child is born as a Muslim. The role of the family is to teach the traditions of the faith. But that faith is implanted at birth.”
Other critics say the ideas behind the campaign are seriously flawed, especially the notion that it is possible to bring children up in a neutral environment. Fr Stephen Wang says “the call to liberate children is superficially appealing but fundamentally naive . . . If you really want your children to be free, you need to tell them why their freedom matters, and help them appreciate some of the values they might pursue. And to do that, you need to use at least a few labels.”
“I would prefer that children were not baptised or indoctrinated,” says Belfast-based religious affairs broadcaster, Malachi O’Doherty. “I think the whole shift in religious culture is towards people drawing their spiritual ideas from their own subjective experiences. We should help young people to grow into that kind of sensibility and that may be the very opposite of training them in a denominational perspective.” Some Northern parents have welcomed the campaign: “Now that I have kids of my own, I’m damned sure no-one is going to be putting them in convenient little boxes that correspond to societal bigotry,” writes one local blogger.
Brian McClinton, of the Northern Ireland Humanist Association, is frustrated at what he calls the “wilful misunderstanding” of the campaign. “We’re not devil-worshippers,” he says wearily. “In a society full of labels, this is simply a plea for freedom of thought. All the billboard is doing is asking parents to be aware that children are not their possessions, that they have rights too . . . Why brainwash them with fantastical nonsense about floods and original sins, heavens and hells, resurrections, deaths and apocalypses?”
In a final ironic twist, it’s been revealed that the gleeful children pictured on the billboard, revelling in their humanistic freedom from ideological baggage, are – unbeknown to the humanists – evangelical Christians. Their father, Brad Mason, says their Christianity must have shone through: “I reckon it shows we have brought up our children in a good way and that they are happy.”
