Should Conservative Christians be Allowed to Care for Our Children?

Eunice and Owen Johns are Christian Pentecostalists who believe that sexual relations other than those within marriage between one man and one woman are morally wrong. They also want to be foster parents.

Should they be allowed to care for other people’s children? Derby city council have been reluctant to allow this, and the High Court has recently agreed with the council that the attitudes of potential foster carers to sexuality are a relevant legal consideration. Considering the moral question whether they should be allowed to foster – that is, the question of what the law ought to say about cases like this – my colleague Michelle Hutchinson cautiously says it all depends on the risks of harm to the child, and the risks of harm to society as a whole, but implies that her sympathies lie with the council. With one proviso, I believe we should allow Eunice and Owen Johns to foster – because to do anything else would be illiberal.

First, a few facts about the case at hand. Eunice and Owen Johns look like a loving and inoffensive couple in the press photos. But the Court’s decision indicates that they have previouly expressed an inability to support “a young person who was confused about their sexuality.” They believe that homosexuality is “against God’s laws and morals”. Owen Johns has said that if a young person in his care thinks they may be gay, he would “gently turn them around”. Eunice Johns has said that she once visited San Francisco, a city famous for its large gay population, and she felt uncomfortable there and didn’t like it.

The Johns’ views about homosexuality are, in my opinion, egregious, reprehensible, ignorant, and substantively mistaken. Even if you want to derive your ethical guidance from Jesus’ teachings, the fact that he is never recorded as having mentioned homosexuality anywhere in the Bible ought to give his followers pause for thought. And if they are going to be take a prohibition on homosexuality seriously because some guy may have said something against it once or twice in the New Testament, then, respectfully, Eunice and Owen Johns ought to take that same guy’s views about the place of women and proper gender-specific headwear codes seriously too:

3But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ. 4Every man who has something on his head while praying or prophesying disgraces his head. 5But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved. 6For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her hair cut off; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, let her cover her head. 7For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. 8For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; 9for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake.

But I digress…

If you’ve read one of the irresponsible and inaccurate reports in the press, you may have been led to believe that what is at stake here is the principle of whether righteous Christians who profess their faith are legally considered fit to foster or adopt children – and that the High Court has decided that they are not. The Court says emphatically “not so”. Forgive me for quoting some excerpts of the decision at length here:

It is hard to know where to start with this travesty of the reality … No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not ‘fit and proper’ persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. No one is seeking to force Christians or adherents of other faiths into the closet. No one is asserting that the claimants are bigots. No one is seeking to give Christians, Jews or Muslims or, indeed, peoples of any faith, a second class status. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law, to our polity and to our way of life, that everyone is equal: equal before the law and equal as a human being endowed with reason and entitled to dignity and respect.
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Religion – whatever the particular believer’s faith – is no doubt something to be encouraged but it is not the business of government or of the secular courts, though the courts will, of course, pay every respect and give great weight to the individual’s religious principles. Article 9 of the European Convention, after all, demands no less. The starting point of the common law is thus respect for an individual’s religious principles coupled with an essentially neutral view of religious beliefs and benevolent tolerance of cultural and religious diversity. A secular judge must be wary of straying across the well-recognised divide between church and state. It is not for a judge to weigh one religion against another. The court recognises no religious distinctions and generally speaking passes no judgment on religious beliefs or on the tenets, doctrines or rules of any particular section of society. All are entitled to equal respect. And the civil courts are not concerned to adjudicate on purely religious issues, whether religious controversies within a religious community or between different religious communities.
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However, it is important to realise that reliance upon religious belief, however conscientious the belief and however ancient and respectable the religion, can never of itself immunise the believer from the reach of the secular law. And invocation of religious belief does not necessarily provide a defence to what is otherwise a valid claim.
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Some cultural beliefs and practices are simply treated by the law as being beyond the pale. Some manifestations of religious practice will be regulated if contrary to a child’s welfare. One example is the belief that the infliction of corporal punishment is an integral part of the teaching and education of children and is efficacious.
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The present dispute is merely one of a number of recent cases where the tension has been between an individual’s Christian beliefs and discrimination law as enacted by Parliament.
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If children, whether they are known to be homosexuals or not, are placed with carers who … evince an antipathy, objection to or disapproval of, homosexuality and same-sex relationships, there may well be a conflict with the local authority’s duty to “safeguard and promote” the “welfare” of looked-after children.
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It is quite impossible to maintain that a local authority is not entitled to consider a prospective foster carer’s views on sexuality, least of all when, as here, it is apparent that the views held, and expressed, by the claimants might well affect their behaviour as foster carers. This is not a prying intervention into mere belief. Neither the local authority nor the court is seeking to open windows into people’s souls. The local authority is entitled to explore the extent to which prospective foster carers’ beliefs may affect their behaviour, their treatment of a child being fostered by them

The court thus takes itself to be essentially taking the approach that Michelle Hutchinson recommends. The local authority is properly concerned with the welfare of the child, and the court says that they are entitled to consider the prospective carer’s views on sexuality insofar as these views may affect the child’s welfare.

It’s a well-written legal decision, and there’s a lot right about it. So how can I disagree with such an eminently reasonable position? Well, I start by noting that just like Derby council, the Johns also consider themselves to be concerned with the welfare of the child. They sincerely believe that failing to “gently turn around”  a young person who thinks they might be homosexual would be akin to failing to direct the child away from an addiction to heroin, or a career in shoplifting, or some other waste of life and talent.

But the Johns are mistaken you may reply! A young person’s welfare consists in part in embracing his or her developing sexual identity, and in his or her ability to celebrate diversity of sexual orientation. It is simply mistaken to think that having a developing homosexual interest, for a young adult, is in any way like having a developing interest in hard drugs or crime.

I fully agree with that. But the issue here is not whether I personally agree. It is, rather, whether our political institutions should make a judgment about this issue. And it’s plausible that they should refrain from doing so. To see why, consider for a moment how it would be if conservative Christians like Eunice and Owen Johns formed a majority of the UK population, and were considering how best to select potential child carers. If they were to make judgments about what is in the interests of the comprehensive welfare of children, they would conclude that any carers who would ignore, or even encourage and approve of, homosexual tendencies or behaviour would be at best woefully negligent in their care. They would insist that only those who are willing to declare homosexuality unacceptable could qualify to care for children.

Our hypothetical conservative Christian majority would be mistaken in their judgments about what is in a child’s welfare, and would be legislating erroneously. But that is not the point. We live in a society in which there is deep disagreement about many moral issues. This  means that we cannot reach consensus on a comprehensive judgment about what is in a child’s best interests. If we are to avoid the tyranny of a majority that seeks to impose its comprehensive value system on others, we must agree to limit the interference of government with our privately held moral values.

According to the philosopher John Rawls, government should be organized so as to allow individuals, so far as possible, to pursue their own comprehensive conceptions of the good, and government ought to maintain neutrality between these conceptions. This is the doctrine of political liberalism. Reasonable people will form an overlapping consensus around these liberal principles; agreeing that each may pursue what he regards as good, so long as his pursuit does not infringe on the ability of others to do the same. In the political liberal state, government is not concerned with promoting one particular conception of the good, but only with promoting liberal citizenship – the ability of each to form and pursue his own preferred conception of the good.

The Rawlsian politically liberal state would still be able to regulate foster carers, and would certainly deny some citizens the permission to look after children. But it would not do so on the grounds of any particular comprehensive conception of the welfare of children. It would concern itself only with ensuring that children were well brought up to become liberal citizens – each with maximum ability to rationally form and pursue  his or her own conception of the good. The liberal state would not be neutral about the best means of producing the next generation of liberal citizens; it would not allow, for example,  the religious beliefs of carers about the value of corporal punishment in education to trump established scientific evidence.

Here we come to the liberal provisos about Eunice and Owen Johns, and people like them. They need not approve of homosexual behaviour to be carers in the liberal state – indeed they would be fully entitled to express their own strong opinions. But they must be willing to nurture any child in their care even while they may overtly disapprove of its own sexual behaviour or that of others, and they must be willing to provide the child with the resources and information needed to let it decide as it grew older how best to lead its life. The liberal state would not allow carers to inculcate views that fundamentally conflict with political liberalism, nor generally to engage in indoctrination. But any carers willing to meet these provisos could qualify, whatever their personal moral and religious beliefs.

By refusing to endorse any particular comprehensive conception of the welfare of children, the liberal state would be even-handed and non-judgmental in its demands: pro-homosexual dogmatists would be just as unwelcome to apply as homophobic dogmatists. It is for these reasons that the liberal state represents an attractive compromise between conflicting comprehensive conceptions of the good. Is it not also, then, the fairest form of government we could reasonably hope to have?