Scottish Christian.com

Home > News > Scottish Christian News Monitor

Free Church calls on Salmond to set up religious schools

The Free Church of Scotland has urged Alex Salmond to create faith schools based on hardline Presbyterian principles. They have also called for abortion to be made illegal.

The editor of the Church's official magazine, Rev David Robertson, has written to the First Minister as part of his National Conversation on Scotland's constitutional future and published the letter in the latest edition of the Church's Monthly Record.

He wrote: "You want us to have a National Conversation about the future government of Scotland. Good and well. Can we join in?"

The Dundee-based minister then outlined the Scotland the deeply conservative and Calvinist church wants to see.

"We would like to see a free country where people are really free," he wrote.

"We would like religious freedom – to be able to believe what the Bible says without fear of persecution or discrimination.

"Can we have our schools back? In 1872 the Free Church, together with the other Presbyterian churches, gave up their schools to be run by the state.

"This was done of the condition that they continued to be Christian schools run on a Christian ethos.

"As Scottish education has moved away from its Christian roots so it has drifted into a dumbed-down social education which increasingly achieves less and less.

"The result of this is that the rich can send their children off to 'good schools' while the poor are left with sink schools and little prospect of advancement."

He also used emotive and highly controversial language to call for the laws on abortion to be changed.

"We need a Scotland that cares for the weak and powerless, especially the unborn child who is ripped from the womb and slaughtered before she even has a chance to speak."

Full story at Scotland on Sunday.

Sunday, April 7
Letter to the Editor: We are the Free Choice Church

Contrary to the report 'Wee Frees call on Salmond to set up religious schools' (March 30), the Free Church has not called for Alex Salmond to set up Free Church schools "espousing strict biblical principles", nor based on "hard-line Presbyterian principles". And for the record, we are not a "conservative" denomination – we are actually a radical biblical church.

What I was calling for in my letter was that our schools should return to their Christian roots and resist the infiltration of one minority secularist perspective. If that is not to be the case then those of us who believe in the basic principles of a Christian education (tolerance, respect, knowledge, inquiry and love based upon truth) should be allowed to have our children educated according to that philosophy – as much as the secularists want their children to be educated according to their philosophy.

The difference between what we are requesting and the secularists is that we want freedom of choice, whilst they want everyone to be educated according to their philosophy, at taxpayers' expense.

David A Robertson, editor, The Monthly Record, Dundee

Full story at Scotland on Sunday.