I was out and about today on the trusty public transport system and picked up a copy of the Metro.

While idly flicking through I spotted this advertisement by the DWP.

Now I haven’t mentioned it before but just for the record, I’m an atheist. I don’t try and shove my own beliefs about spirituality down other people’s throats, but equally I do not appreciate it when others seek to do so from their own religious perspective. I believe strongly that we should live in a society where everyone is free to believe spiritually in what they wish as long as it is not to the detriment of those who choose to believe in something else, or equally choose not to believe in anything remotely spiritual at all. From that perspective I’m a fairly liberal person. I believe in the separation of religious institutions from the state and the abolition of faith based schools on the basis that the state cannot achieve a position whereby it is able to either equitably or be seen to be equitable to all faiths. Some will always bemoan that favouritism is being bestowed on one against the other and the only solution is the separation of religion from the workings of the state and its institutions.

Equally by their very nature, faith based organisations always come from a particular moral and ethical perspective which when given power over individuals will seek to exercise that power for the furtherance of their own particular moral or ethical perspective. We saw this recently over Catholic adoption agencies opposing the rights for gay people to adopt. By which terms they are not seeking to do the job of an adoption agency and placing children with loving and caring parents, moreover because they take a particular view towards the issue of homosexuality they seek to deny gay couples of the right to adopt purely because that certain group in society do not conform to their own moral position.

So that made me wonder about why exactly the DWP would seem to be so keen to engage with faith based groups for what is termed loosely as getting people back to work. Obviously one can only guess at to what role faith based groups would play within helping Jobseekers get back to work and I don’t discount the role that third sector partners may be able to play in this area but why it seems there is such an emphasis on encouraging faith based groups. There has been experience of using faith based groups in what could loosely be termed the social welfare system in Australia with some rather worrying results for those who choose not be affiliated to a certain religion. I would be very wary of going down the same path here, especially when there seems to be no justifiable reason.

Faith based groups can offer nothing more than any other third party organisation seeking to perform a function for society, they are no more efficient, better run or motivated to achieve the goals set them than any other group so I do not see the point. What they do however, is introduce ethics and morals into the system whereby those ethics and morals may not be accepted by or even be completely opposed to that of the person who is engaging with the organisation.

This is not a problem in wider society, if I choose not to engage in going to church, the temple or the mosque then I don’t have to. However if I am made redundant and end up on a New Deal scheme run by a faith group that may not be my own if I were to be religious or any faith given my own atheism then that poses issues that simply do not need to be there in the first place.