Björn Ulvaeus from Abba makes quite fascinating reading with his belief that religion, and religion alone, is what indoctrinates children. As it happens I spent the late seventies in Sweden, a period when Abba was one of the biggest export industries the country had and I have never lived in a more devout society, nor one with more indoctrination at every level. But what the Swedes then worshipped wasn't God. It was themselves.
This was a country where huge billboards exhorted us to eat "6 to 8 slices of bread a day", and the purchase of legal alcohol was more difficult than buying cannabis in modern Britain. The Prime Minister gave sermons (sorry: made speeches) twenty pages long to which the congregation listened in respectful silence. All manner of sin was to be abolished, from sexism to inequality and anyone who doubted this was treated as a crazy heretic.
Swedes didn't, in those days, need religion to feel different from, and superior to, the rest of the world. They just knew it in their inmost souls. As it happened, the family I married into were devout Christians, or had been before I knew them: they and their kind felt almost entirely excluded from the reigning orthodoxies of the time.
This didn't make their atheist children any more broadminded. One of my sisters-in-law said to me once, as I was driving her home, 30 miles out of my way, that she couldn't imagine herself ever marrying a foreigner. It must be a really strange thing to do, she added. I don't suppose it ever occurred to her that it was something I had done myself.
The growth of independent faith schools in Sweden is more than anything else a reaction to the collapse of standards within the state system. Ulvaeus's remark that the European Convention on Human Rights makes it impossible to shut the faith schools down is straight out of the seventies; I don't feel I need take lectures on tolerance from anyone nostalgic for that society.
