What’s RE For? – Adam Dinham and Martha Shaw

Adam Dinham and Martha Shaw,

Faiths & Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

It has been said that RE is in crisis. It’s required in schools, but not in the national curriculum. Funding for RE teacher training has been slashed. Yet despite its omission from the EBacc, RE remains a popular subject in schools. Nevertheless it remains often questioned in terms of its status and academic seriousness.

This all reflects a wider muddle about religion more generally. In short, there is a lamentable quality of conversation about religion and belief, which calls in to question practically every aspect of its public presence, including in school RE.

It’s true in universities, too. We recently conducted research in three universities to understand the narratives of religious faith as they are experienced and lived by students and staff. We found students who hadn’t felt able to attend for interviews, or for exams, or for Saturday lectures because of clashes with religious events. There were anxieties about public speakers and what to ‘allow’ them to say on topics like Israel and Zionism. Timetabling staff were worried about how to handle the exam periods for the four or five years after 2014 when Ramadan falls in the middle of it. Canteens and bars were taking all sorts of stands for or against halal food, alcohol-free events, and single-sex socials, and there were bitter rumours in one institution that the Muslims were receiving subsidized lunches. Residences were struggling with kosher kitchens and women only halls. There were campus banks which either could or couldn’t handle the requests of Muslim students for halal borrowing for student fees. And counselling services which felt they couldn’t talk about religion with religious students. These might seem arcane concerns until you put them in the context of the things keeping university Vice Chancellors awake at night – a competitor-beating student experience being prominent among them. And presumably there are proxies here too with all sorts of other sectors and settings.

The question these cases, and others like them, pose is how equipped are we for the religious identity which is out there, regardless of our own religion or belief, or none? For RE, it is what part can – and should – it play in equipping young people for such engagement?

In recent years, RE has increasingly – and largely accidentally – been populated by themes like citizenship and cohesion, especially within the UK. In Europe, inter-cultural education has been promoted in this space, though it hasn’t yet really taken root in many countries. What both approaches imply is that RE is primarily intended to perform a specific social function – to connect across difference. This is increasingly driven by anxiety about extremism, and about the challenge of responding to growing diversity as Europe continues to globalize.

These are important concerns, no doubt, and they should certainly be addressed somewhere, somehow. But why in the RE space? And how far has it been thought through, consciously and thoroughly, by the RE community itself? Part of RE is the development of skills and understanding which equip young people to engage positively with ideas and concepts different from, and sometimes challenging to their own, and this can aid good relations across difference. The notion that RE can help produce citizens who are tolerant of all religions and none is seductive, to be sure. But we already know that understanding is not a guarantee of tolerance and respect. And in any case, on its own, it presents a hollowed out version of the RE idea. It misses the wider opportunities for simple, wide-eyed enrichment. And it colludes with an idea of religion as the opposite – as a threat to cohesion about which something must be done.

We see RE in a different way: it should not be about cohesion and citizenship alone, but about the study of religions and beliefs in themselves, as a basis for a well-informed engagement with the rich variety of religion and belief encounters throughout life. We should educate our young people about religion alongside the other Arts and Humanities, enabling them to understand the chain of memory in which they stand – most of whose links were forged in the religious mode – and the comings and goings of religion in history and place across the world. The discipline of History is not asked to deliver ‘good citizens’, nor geography the ‘global self’. That would be to confuse civic and moral categories which should be part of the wider formation of young people. Education in general is certainly intended for such moral formation, but it should not be holed up in one marginal corner where it takes up all the space.

The exciting thing is that RE does have an opportunity to change, and the debate is very promising. True, a century or so of secular assumptions has resulted in us talking not very much and not very well about all this religion and belief. And at precisely the time while we’ve mostly been looking away, the religious landscape has changed enormously. But huge amounts of new data about religion and belief have been coming out of the recent £12m Arts and Humanities Research Council programme of research, which reveals how, and there is a discernible turn in the direction of knowledge and understanding about religion and belief which RE can help invigorate.

In the UK 2011 Census, the headlines are that Christianity remains the largest religion in England and Wales with 33.2 million people but is down from 71.7 per cent in 2001 to 59.3%. Muslims are the next biggest religious group with 2.7 million people (4.8 per cent of the population) and this group has grown in the last decade. In fact this is the most increasing group (from 3.0 per cent to 4.8 per cent). The proportion of the population who reported they have no religion has now reached a quarter in the UK – 14.1 million people. This is an increase (from 14.8 per cent to 25.1 per cent).

Likewise, in England and Wales, while church attendance has fallen to 6.3% of the population (Christian Research), the breakdown of attenders has also changed – less than one third are now Anglican, less than one third Catholic, and over a third (44%) charismatic and independent. That’s a massive internal realignment within Christianity alone, which is hardly ever commented upon.

According to other sources, what we believe has changed too. Belief in ‘a personal God’ roughly halved between 1961 and 2000 – from 57% of the population to 26%. But over exactly the same period, belief in a ‘spirit or life force’ doubled – from 22% in 1961 to 44% in 2000.

There is evidence of consumerist behaviours in religion. And others have non-religious beliefs which are deeply important to them, as in humanism, secularism and environmentalism.

It’s really important to grasp this because there is a real religious landscape and one imagined by the majority, and there is a growing gap between them. And this generates the muddle. RE can have a crucial role to play in correcting this.

It’s also important that RE helps us to develop a good social understanding of what’s going on. For example, one compelling account is found in Grace Davie’s idea that we are believing without belonging. And Hervieu-Leger inverts this to say that we are also increasingly belonging without believing. Linda Woodhead thinks it is wrong to say that real dogmatic religion is declining, leaving people with a muddled and fuzzy residue. She thinks the exact opposite is true: real religion – which is to say everyday, lived religion – is thriving and evolving, whilst hierarchical, dogmatic forms are marginalised. These sorts of sociological insights should be a part of a reinvigorated school RE too, because they help us understand the contexts of religion and belief, as well as the content.

RE does not do best when it is marginalized and populated by proxy themes like cohesion. Neither is it at its strongest when it sticks to teaching the world religions as though ‘they’ are ‘out there’, or as historical traditions, either in the past or stuck there. Religion is contemporary and real. It is lived. It is identity, as well as tradition, and it is contested internally in each individuals’ daily experience. The pressing religious and social question of our time is how we equip people to get to grips with the religion and belief which turns out to be all around after all. We need RE more than ever, and more than that – an RE which teaches our young people about the real religious landscape, and can help us clarify the muddle.