STOCKHOLM—Sweden is moving to outlaw religious education.
The country’s Secondary Education Minister Anna Ekström and Public Administration Minister Ardalan Shekarabi said they supported banning faith schools.
“The important thing for us is that in school there are no confessional elements,” said Ekström, a member of the ruling Swedish Social Democratic Party.
It means that 71 Swedish schools — 59 Christian, eleven Muslim, and one Jewish — would have to either close entirely or be “reformed” and secularized in accordance with a proposed new law.
Shekarabi wrote in an op-ed for daily newspaper Aftonbladet that he supports banning faith schools, citing his experiences with gender segregation in his native Iran. Referencing phenomenons connected to the arrival in Sweden of hundreds of thousands of Muslims since the 1970s, he wrote “I see religious oppression again — in Swedish schools.”
According to Annika Henroth-Rothstein, a Swedish political consultant and journalist, the proposal comes on the heels of several revelations concerning Muslim schools’ engaging in segregation between boys and girls. ‘’Public discussion of that practice is the result of a massive backlash against the wave of immigration to Sweden over the past five years. It has shaken Swedish society to its core,’’ she wrote.
The Muslim population nears 10%.
Henroth-Rothstein said that ‘’plenty of legislation to protect Swedish children from religious indoctrination already exists. Swedish schools, religious as well as secular, distinguish between “education” and “learning,” as odd as that may sound.’’
‘’Rather than face the consequences of the immigration crisis, Sweden is outlawing culture and religion. Legislation is easier than liberation, because the former asks nothing of you, whereas the latter requires your active participation,’’ she added.
Ilya Meyer, a Swedish Jew and former deputy chair of a branch of the Sweden-Israel Friendship Association, called the targeting of all faith schools to end extremist indoctrination in Muslim ones “a bizarre move by the increasingly repressive Swedish government.”
“Because the Swedish government cannot ever be seen to be saying or doing anything against Muslim intransigence because it is Muslim intransigence, its solution is to tar all religious schools with the same brush and ban them all,” he wrote on Facebook.