The two faces of liberal Religious Education

Religious education in England is under threat from the move to make all schools academies. Religious educators are therefore looking for a renewed justification to promote it anew. But there still is a lack of consensus over the meaning, purpose and remit of the subject, as recently shown by a discussion on Beyond Belief (Radio 4).

The late Professor Terence Copley, the only chaired Professor of Religious Education in the University of Oxford’s history, was concerned about the uncertainty of the nature and lack of purpose of RE before his untimely death in 2011.

One question that interested Copley was what had happened in the 1960s, both socially and educationally, that led to liberal and secular models of religious education dominant in the subsequent decades. His thesis was that religious education in England and Wales had dispensed with God, and could even act as a form of secular indoctrination. (Indeed, small scale research suggests that schools can be hostile environments for believing students).

Copley, a Quaker who had moved from Methodism, was liberally-minded in theology, but towards the end of his life, saw some weaknesses in a religious education founded on liberal theology. He once commented to me in a private conversation: ‘I think we’ve got to have a liberal religious education, but not a simple, naïve one, like we used to have, but a more complex one’.

In this blog, I try and make sense of what Copley meant by this in order to gain further conceptual purchase on what religious education should and could be today. I do so by invoking the useful dichotomy, used by the political philosopher John Gray, that liberalism has ‘two faces’. One is an ideology or set of absolute values or a ‘comprehensive doctrine’; the other is an accommodation of incompatible values, a modus vivendi (way of living).

Firstly, it is important to clarify some terms.

By ‘liberalism’, I mean a ‘free’ ideology, or free way of thinking. This can be applied to economics, politics, education, religion, etc. Since the Enlightenment, liberalism – one of its main legacies – has become the dominant political and economic mode of thought, and with it has come the associated notions of democracy, religious freedom and tolerance.

By liberal theology, on the other hand, I mean a post-enlightenment tradition of theology that can be traced back to Schleiermacher, that rests on a simple ethical monotheism, and an individual’s own experience of God, and tends towards an inclusive or universal view of other religions.

With increased religious diversity caused by immigration and secularisation, since the 1970s or so, religious educators have adopted various approaches to the subject that we may call ‘liberal’- ‘free’ ways of educating about religion that allow for, or deal with, religious difference and supposedly promote tolerance and freedom of belief.

Given the liberal tradition of Britain, and the tenets of freedom of belief and association, it is impossible to think of religious education that was not liberal in some sense. So what did Copley mean by naïve liberalism?

By ‘naïve liberalism’ I think Copley was referring to the theological liberalism that has underpinned many of the moves within RE since the 1960s, when RE ceased to aim to be a form of Christian nurture. The theology of these developments is often associated with John Hick. These approaches included a thematic approach when several religions are studied across modules such as ‘festivals’ or ‘rites of passage’, and the ‘world religions’ approach, when five or six world religions are studied and their beliefs and practices are compared.

From the 1990s onwards, these approaches have been criticised by Barnes, Wright and others because they resulted in, and rested on, the liberal, inclusive, theological vision of universalism: that religions were equally valid, perhaps even ‘all the same at heart’. They point out that this imposition of liberal theology when coupled with the liberal tenets of freedom of belief and tolerance privatises religious belief and indoctrinates children.

I also argue that there is second naïve liberalism that has dominated RE in more recent years that is also a comprehensive set of values in itself. This is the ideology behind an instrumental view of RE as a subject whose primary aim is to foster ‘social cohesion.’ RE’s task is to make sure religions remain compatible with the ideals of the secular, liberal state, and compatible with each other. This naïve liberalism became prominent post 9/11 when some have suggested it became the home front of a wider war of liberalism against terrorism.

I call these conceptions of religious education ‘naïve liberalisms’ because they are both a comprehensive and overbearing set of values. In short, they make explicit and totalising claims about the nature of religions that could alienate students and other stakeholders who do not agree with the ideologies and theologies undergirding them.

What happens if you do not share the universalism and inclusivism of John Hick, for example, as many religious traditions do not? The social cohesion agenda, on the other hand, arguably leads to misrepresentation, either by a romantic apologetic, or by further stigmatisation as we have seen in the case of Islam in the curriculum.

I contend that the naïve liberalisms I have described above count as comprehensive doctrines that clash in critical cases with religions.

In contrast to these liberalisms, I would like to advance that there could be a second ‘face’ of liberal RE that could be more complex, and would not represent a comprehensive value in itself. This could be a kind of RE that balanced different views of religions and operated as a modus vivendi. This would be a fairer approach, actually more compatible with religious freedom because it did not squash religions into any comprehensive view, and would actually allow individuals to be presented with, and to hold, any reasonable conception of life. This includes the possibility of a genuine encounter of religions, including the possibility of actually believing exclusively in a religion on its own terms.

Naïve liberal conceptions of RE make religions lose their distinctiveness and exclusivity. They have trivialised their alternative epistemological and metaphysical outlooks. They’ve even reduced their ‘religiousness’.

Religious educators need to consider addressing these problems. For after all, in times when religion continues to be of national and international significance, what use is salt if it loses its saltiness (Mark 9:50)?