Putting the R back in RE – Terence Copley

There’s always been a tendency for some teachers to feel apologetic about RE and to try to conceal from children that it’s religion they are getting so interested in. One occasionally hears cases of puzzled Year 12 students going into the AS exam to find that the paper is called – Religious Studies! – not, as they thought, Philosophy and Ethics or some similar title. Some secondary schools have even re-named the RE department to keep religion out of the shop window, which seems strange given that religion is a potent force in the lives of women, men and children across the planet. Not that being a potent force makes religion necessarily true, or good, which is why we don’t need to worry about the R word appearing in the title. There’s such a lot to debate. Not only that, but a seasoned campaigner like me has noticed a change in attitudes at classroom level. 20 years ago, children tended to keep their religious identity secret in class. It was distinctly uncool to be seen as religious. In those days RE teachers sometimes had to protect religious children from ridicule. Now in classrooms I regularly hear children informally asking others what they believe and listening with respect to what they are told. Religious beliefs are no longer haraam in the classroom!

But the issue goes a lot deeper than the title of the subject and the extent to which students reveal or conceal their personal religious identity – if any. I have written on a number occasions about a tendency in some RE to secularise religious material. Thus, for instance, Joseph is treated like the liberal secular hero of the Amazing Technicolor (©) Dreamcoat rather than the Joseph of the Hebrew Bible or Yusuf of Sura Yusuf in the Qur’an. Any dream will not do in these sacred texts, as dreams are seen as one way in which God communicates. The Biblos Project at Exeter University found plenty of other evidence of secularisation, for example of David and Goliath being reduced to a secular narrative about bullying, or made subordinate to that Great British myth, the little guy standing up to the big guy.

Little has been written about another prime example of this tendency to secularise religious material, the treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. in some RE. MLK is a very popular subject in KS3. There is, of course, a real element of martyrdom in the story and there is the tendency to present him as a secular hero figure, battling for human rights. In some RE lessons, that’s as far as the story goes. MLK is depicted as a landmark hero in the history of human rights. But why? Iwan Russell-Jones, a BBC director who has interested himself in RE (he directed the Secular Believers series for KS4 and 5 RE by BBC Wales in 2006) recently produced a documentary, MLK: American Prophet, shown on BBC2 in April this year. The presenter is Oona King, whose uncle happened to be MLK’s lawyer. The Radio Times (29.3.08) makes the point, as if for RE: ‘by making King into a secular saint, we have airbrushed his faith out of the picture. Oona is “a devout atheist” but she argues that, for King, being a Baptist pastor (from a line of them) was central to his sense of mission. He saw himself as a prophet called by God to redeem the soul of America.’ The time has come to rehabilitate King along these lines in RE.

MLK is, of course, one example among many. We really need to rehabilitate some RE rather than bits of it, so that the issue of motivation – of our religious subjects, not of the classes! – is explored in more detail and more depth. What people did must be matched with equal consideration of why they did it. And if we find motives are complex, not always selfless, sometimes confused, and for some people perceived as God-driven, we are simply inducting our students into people as they are and the world as it is. This treatment has another off-spin and that is for those who go on to post-16 modules in Black theology. They will have a better grasp of MLK to compare with what they will then be learning about James Cone, Dwight Hopkins etc..

We have every right to be atheists or agnostics if we choose, as do the children we teach, but we have no right to edit God out of the lives of religious people in the way in which we present them in the classroom. Once upon a real time I wrote a biography of Thomas Arnold, the head of Rugby School. At one point in writing it I became aware that I probably knew more about Arnold than anyone else – which gave me dangerous power in the book to make him whom I chose. Historians have this awesome power, as they are the custodians of the dead, who cannot contradict how they have been presented. But RE teachers also have this power over the people whom they are presenting in RE, MLK among them. We have to be fair to them and to the faith traditions to which they were so committed, in the way in which we represent them in the classroom. Put in the formal language of agreed syllabuses, we have to help students to consider how religious and other beliefs lead to particular actions and concerns (Oxford Agreed Syllabus, 2007, p12). The 2007 Birmingham Agreed Syllabus urges RE to ‘give close attention to what religious traditions treasure as inspiring, good, beautiful, true and sacred’ (p5). MLK’s life would be a case study for that.

Terence Copley