Bedales and Religion

By Clare Jarmy, Teacher of Philosophy & Religious Studies

“That’ll be a short talk, then”, commented one of my friends on hearing I was going to a talk given by former Bedales Headmaster Tim Slack about Bedales and religion. It is often taken for granted that Bedales is a non-religious school, and set up to be such. Tim Slack’s talk did however go some way in rectifying this view as being only part of the reality of Bedales’ relationship with religion.

For many of us who attended less progressive public schools, school religion was marvellously parodied in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, where we see the chaplain in full vestments leading the school in the prayer “Oh God, ooh you are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh we’re all terribly impressed down here, I can tell you.” Chapel was full of gowns, parading prefects, incomprehensible prayers and readings about “He who brought the butter-dish to Belshazzar”.

It has never been like this at Bedales, and we have lacked the trappings of organized religion right from the outset. With no chaplain and no chapel to put him in, Bedales' founder John Badley made a conscious decision to deal with religion differently from many public schools. As we hear in Memories and Reflections, Badley found that much of his mother’s staunch Protestantism had “melted away” by the time he finished at Cambridge, and when he founded Bedales, was very keen that students should not be forced to espouse religious doctrine and practice with which he did not agree.

What beliefs Badley himself held is a very interesting question. He seems to have been uncomfortable with the expression of religion in a formal context, especially when that was kept separate from the way in which one led one’s life. In Memories and Reflections, Badley said that he found Christianity to be “the highest form of religious expression”, but that it was the teachings of Jesus, rather than church doctrine, that he found compelling. Perhaps his view on religion can be best summed up in a Jaw he gave in December 1923, in which he said that religion was:

• Values, moral and aesthetic, that we hold strongly
• The rejection of blind, uncaring chance as being at the centre of human endeavour
• The priority of spiritual concerns in our daily lives

We can ask many questions about what Badley believed to be true, but in a way this would be to defeat the object of his claims about religion. There is something quite pragmatic, or even pragmatist in his approach: that is it the place that certain values have in someone’s life that are of greater importance than belief in doctrine and observance of certain rituals.

Hence Jaw was created, a Sunday evening service with prayers, hymns and an address, not a sermon. When one reads Badley’s own Jaws, one can see that the style is not one of preaching, but questioning key notions of the meaning of life, and the values that the Bedales community shared. Jaw as it exists to this day retains some of that flavour, with visiting speakers, representative of a wide variety of religious views, Jaws given by staff, and occasional days on which we mark religious festivals with poetry and music.

So Bedales has found its own way of doing religion – one that recognises religious heritage, and where prayers are occasionally said, and hymns and carols occasionally sung, whilst remaining of a noticeably different flavour to that of many other public schools. It has always been an environment in which those of diverse religious backgrounds hold true to certain key values that define Bedales as a community.