BBC Radio 4 2016-02-24

BBC Radio 4 2016-02-24

Good morning. Yesterday MPs debated how to measure the life chances of children and the factors that hold them back. The Government wanted to remove the requirement that they measure family income, preferring to record factors such as household unemployment and educational attainment. Their critics argued that family income is such a key indicator that it cannot be ignored; low household income – they say - remains the principal cause of poverty among children and to lose sight of this would be a retrograde step.

Whatever the causes of success and failure of children, it is possible to hear in this argument echoes of an old theological debate about human destiny and about how much or little we are in charge of our own destiny. The Protestant Reformers rejected the idea that you could earn your own salvation by good works. They preached that salvation comes from God alone and there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves. Some went so far as to suggest that by simply trying to do the right thing man could get in the way of God’s free grace.

At the extreme of this argument was the horrible idea that since God chooses to save some, through no merit of their own, he must choose to damn others, through no especial fault of their own. This grim doctrine led many people to be convinced that they were destined for hell and they lived a wretched life because of it.

This may seem a long way from yesterday’s debate, but translate predestination into secular terms, and you get the idea that if you grow up in a poor household you are predestined to have a poorer life. You can expect to do less well at school, to have worse health, and to die earlier. And if you then extend the analogy - because you can’t do anything about this, it requires state intervention to reduce income inequality and so increase your life chances.

The opposite view is that if you predict future poverty on the basis of low household income you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was what worried those who opposed the doctrine of predestination at the Reformation. They argued that God offered salvation to everyone whatever their circumstances. You might not exactly earn your salvation but you could certainly contribute to it, by responding to God’s grace. In this analogy, making poor people dependent does not set them free but imprisons them. Instead individuals should be empowered to take responsibility for their lives. It is possible for children from poor backgrounds to do well and we should be measuring the other factors - apart from household income - that help or hinder the best outcomes.

Of course there is truth on both sides. Most of us would accept that we are both shaped by the circumstances in which we are born and that we have some capacity to make the best of ourselves. There is both predestination and free will. The theological argument was never quite resolved – and can’t be - because both truths really matter.