ENCOURAGE EQUALITY OF RELIGIONS IN SCHOOLS

All religions, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican, Hindu, Muslim, Orisha, Spiritual Baptist or Judaism should enjoy equality of treatment in the nation’s government and government assisted schools. Where members of these religions are students of these schools they should have equal rights to practise their faiths. None should be discriminated against on the grounds of religion and religious beliefs. Nor should they be subtly excluded from so called prestige schools.

State funds should not be used, directly or indirectly, to market, to promote any particular religion and/or for the exclusion of others as was the practice during slavery and indentureship and colonialism. State funds should not be employed, however unconsciously, 43 years after Trinidad and Tobago achieved its Independence to convey the absurdly mistaken belief that some religious groups are inferior to others.

Indeed, state funds, that is taxpayers’ money, should be withdrawn from any government assisted school which refuses to accept the principle of equality of the teaching and practice of religious beliefs.

During slavery and indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean, West African and Indian religions, for example, were dismissively described as pagan and heathen, and in Haiti a distortion of Vodu (Voodoo) was carefully cultivated by French slave plantation owners, a distortion which lingers to this day, even in the minds of persons of African descent in English speaking Caribbean countries and North America as well.

In Trinidad and Tobago, as in other areas of the Caribbean, adherents of the Spiritual Baptist faith and the practices of the religion, an adaptation of Christianity and West African religion, were ridiculed and targetted for abuse and persecution. Today, more than 50 years after Spiritual Baptists were first allowed, by law, to practise their faith in this country, without being hounded down, arrested and charged by the police on the spurious claim of breaking the law, mind you, there are less than a handful of State assisted Spiritual Baptist schools. And I wager that if there are Spiritual Baptists at Roman Catholic or Protestant secondary schools they are not favoured with equality of time, inter alia, to practise their religious beliefs.

We are still holding, many of us without realising it, to the old Master-Slave relationship and the myth of the superiority of Massa, his culture and religion. In the process, even many of the descendants of slaves have joined in dismissing and seeking to marginalise Spiritual Baptists, the Orishas and others.

And we have allowed this to continue in the schools, in the education system, particularly at the secondary level long accepted, (the secondary school level) long established as the gateway or for that matter the early rungs of the ladder to desired upward mobility.

Lest we forget, it was clearly a matter of Imperialist policy that for the Master-Slave relationship to be effective the "superiority" of Massa had to be demonstrated, not only in the physical treatment of the slaves, but in a contemptuously dismissive attitude to their culture and religion, as well as in a determined crushing of any attempt by the slaves to pursue either.

While European Christians had religious beliefs which were held by the Imperialists as natural and acceptable to all, regardless, African religious beliefs were denounced as "superstitions" and "paganism" and those held by Middle Easterners, Indians and Chinese were attacked as being heathen. Middle Easterners —Syrians, Lebanese and others — who were Muslims quickly abandoned Islam, when they migrated to Trinidad and Tobago, and assumed the mantle of Roman Catholicism which to them was more socially acceptable.

In the United States of America, while he was in office, late US president, Dwight Eisenhower, indulging in religious bigotry and sucking up to Jewish financiers and displaying a contempt for African, Chinese, Indian and Middle East (that is non Jewish) religions would declare: "The spiritual meaning of American democracy is realised in its three great faiths."

Going by the then prevailing mood of Eisenhower and Anglo Saxon Americans and the time, the "three great faiths" were Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. Eisenhower’s statement bore an absurd lack of sensitivity. But I have strayed.

Except Trinidadians and Tobagonians insist on equality of treatment for all religions in the nation’s schools — government and Government Assisted — they will be reinforcing the perception, however unwittingly, not merely that some religions are "superior" and others "inferior" but their followers as well and, ironically, for all the wrong.reasons of history.