Bishops, formally known as Diocesan College, is an elite private Anglican boys’ school in Cape Town. It was founded in 1849 by Robert Gray, the first Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, to provide a Christian education for boys. Bishops remains an Anglican church school. The school is currently engaged in an absurd dispute over whether to fly the gay Pride flag in addition to a host of other political and ideological banners. The Old Diocesan Committee, representing former pupils, has asked the school council to only allow the flying of the South African, Bishops, and St George’s flags, arguing that the school should remain neutral on contested political causes.

The principal has, however argued for continuing to display political and ideological flags, including the Pride flag, while a group of activist parents, staff, and former pupils has argued that it signals to gay pupils that they are welcome and safe at the school. The dispute has revived an earlier controversy over the flag and has become a broader argument about whether an Anglican school should formally endorse political and ideological causes or confine itself to education.

The answer is straightforward. Don’t do it.

There are good reasons why.

The first is that the need to fly political and ideological banners implies that the Christian ethos of the school is insufficient for it to be a morally virtuous institution. The need to fly the Pride flag can only arise from an admission that the Christian ethos is insufficiently tolerant. The same applies to flying the anti-racism flag. That is quite a set of admissions for a Christian school to make, namely that the Christian ethos has such grave shortcomings that contemporary ideological banners must be imported from America to set these right. It is, in a sense, an admission that undoes the entire justification for Bishops’ existence.

The second is that, if the door is opened to political banners, where must the line be drawn? Are all political banners to be flown, or only certain ones? Who would decide that? The headmaster? Or perhaps a politburo could be established? Would the politburo fly the Israeli flag, for example, to demonstrate tolerance of Jews and sympathy for their persecution in the Middle East and in Cape Town? Or would it argue that Jews are not persecuted, either in the Middle East or in Cape Town? Or would Bishops’ headmaster like to explain that they are persecuted but do not warrant having a flag flown? Or what about the Iranian flag (even just once a year to commemorate the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei)? Surely the Iranians are being persecuted by the Jews? And if some pupils decided to stand up for their Western Christian origins, given the threat Iran poses to the Western liberal order, and demanded that the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag be flown, would that be permitted? Or not? And if not, why not? Would it be because Bishops has decided to side with Iran, Russia, and China against the Western liberal order?

This leads to the third point. If Bishops wants to get into all sorts of trouble that will tear its community apart, then it should continue down this road. Politics is a barbaric, cruel, and toxic thing and, more often than not, it breaks people and communities apart. Just look around the world, from the bitter battles pitting the Democrats and Republicans against each other in America to Reform, Labour, and the Tories in the United Kingdom, and to the bitter feuds in South African politics. Bishops must know that it is always like that, and if Bishops starts playing politics, it will be like that at Bishops too, and likely worse, because the people playing politics there are amateurs and have no idea what they are doing. The school, for example, wants to fly the anti-racism flag without any idea of its meaning or, indeed, the meaning of that term in contemporary culture warfare, just as, we are sure, some Bishops people reading this article had to Google “Don’t Tread on Me” to find out what that is all about.

This newspaper has often quoted Enoch Powell as saying, “All political careers end in failure and disgrace.” This is what went wrong at Roedean after that school started taking political and ideological stances. At St John’s, when that institution did the same, the decisions it took to politicise its pupils led directly to the Michaelhouse catastrophe, in a story that will one day still be published. Informed people know what really occurred there, and the Bishops headmaster should apprise himself, because he will cause the same thing to happen at Bishops.

The correct line for all these elite schools to take is this. We are a school and only that. It is our role in society to instil good values and teach elite young men to think so that they can lead society, not to teach them what to think, but simply to think. If they can do that and have learned the right values, and the Christian ethos is about as good a grounding for that as can be found anywhere, then what they think will be good, just, and tolerant. Beyond that, we do not formally adopt any political or ideological stance. Our pupils and community are free to join whatever groups they wish outside the school gates, but they do not bring any of that through the gates.