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I was once asked to run a lunchtime detention for a misbehaving year nine boy called Troy. Having not encountered him before, I decided with five minutes to go, to strike up a conversation. ‘What have you been studying in History lately Troy?’ He pulled a pained face before grunting the obvious, ‘History.’ Unperturbed, I tried another question, ‘What have you been studying in Geography?’ Predictably, his unenthusiastic reply was ‘Geography.’ Feeling the rhythm of the conversation I thought I’d try one more question. ‘What about RE?’ Just as I thought I knew where the conversation was going, Troy paused, looked slightly puzzled and then replied ‘feelings…we just talk about our feelings, we don’t really learn much.’

Unintentionally, Troy had articulated an issue that plagues RE at its very core and from which many others flow. We fear the phenomenon that is the essence, the heart, of our subject. We are afraid to drop the R bomb. We have a discomfort about religion; the very thing that can give RE a unique, distinctive identity and raison d’être in any school wishing to give pupils a rounded education. The unsurprising result of this is widespread religious illiteracy. The 2011 Arts and Humanities Research Council funded report titled ‘Does RE work?’ found that “Religious Education does not, in the main, make students religiously literate (and) sees pupils demonstrate widespread ignorance of basic religious concepts.” This was affirmed in Ofsted’s 2013 report ‘Religious Education: Realising the Potential’ which claimed, “In many of the schools visited, the subject was increasingly losing touch with the idea that RE should be primarily concerned with helping pupils to make sense of the world of religion and belief.” The report makes eighteen separate references to pupils’ knowledge of religion being ‘scant’, ‘insufficient’, ‘superficial’, ‘distorted’, ‘low level’,  ‘weak’ or ‘lacking.’

In this piece I will discuss four reasons why religion has left, or more accurately been pushed out, the RE building. I will then argue that although my analysis may initially sound bleak, by recognition of this problem we can find a more stable future for RE and provide a better education to young people.

1. RE’s primary purpose is not academic

There is a pervasive school of thought within the RE community that RE is not an academic subject like History or Geography, but rather a way of fostering personal development. Whilst deepening pupils’ understanding of religious ideas may contribute to personal development (as may studying English, History, Music etc), it is not a tangible or consistently achievable purpose for a subject. Pursuing personal development over deep understanding of subject matter, results in RE being vacated of meaningful content, as the potential outcome or side effect becomes the subject itself. It runs the risk of reducing the magnitude and complexity of religion to a mushy reflection on our feelings. There are better ways, other than through RE, for schools to encourage personal development, which don’t involve the dubious practice of RE teachers posing as self-help gurus facilitating personal exploration. Such reductionism of the subject drives good graduates away from teaching RE. Religious Education departments at universities are unequivocally academic institutions; schools should be no different. Our best chance of truly personally enriching RE is academically challenging RE. To simply pursue the former, puts the horse so many villages before the cart that they never meet.

2. Religion is boring and irrelevant for pupils

I once told my barber that I teach RE. With a look of pity and concern he said, “oh, I bet it’s hard getting the kids interested in that.” I could handle hearing this from my barber, but I find it embarrassing when it comes from those inside the RE community. Ofsted’s 2013 report claims that inspectors repeatedly found Subject Leaders explaining that they had “moved to study social and ethical issues because they could not see a way of making the direct study of religion challenging and engaging.” If an RE teacher does not believe in the ability of religion, the essence of their subject, to interest and challenge pupils, what hope is there for their pupils?  Furthermore, it is a superficial and shortsighted notion of relevance that replaces religion with trendy social concerns. Paradoxically, it makes the subject less relevant to the lives of pupils, who leave school blindly navigating a world permeated by religion. Religion’s real relevance transcends faddish concerns. The popular sex, drugs and scripture approach to GCSE, in which religion is subsituted for social and ethical issues like bullying, community cohesion, drugs, alcohol, democracy, the environment, animal rights and sport, is simply not Religious Education. If our attempts to raise the profile of RE involve vacating it of its essence, it is no longer RE’s profile that we are raising.

3. RE has been hijacked by political agendas

Harnessed to the erratic flux of political mood, RE has been lumbered with bearing the burden of issues that are at best tenuously linked and at worst irrelevant to the subject’s content. The 2011 Arts and Humanities Research Council report titled ‘Does RE work?’ identified thirteen “competing imperatives” that policymakers have “freighted it with.” These include ‘multicultural awareness’, ‘understanding heritage’ and ‘sex and relationship education.’ At best this results in a homeopathic form of RE, at worst it results in distortion and misrepresentation of religion. Anxious to assert the validity of RE as a timetabled subject, the RE community have not always sufficiently distanced themselves from instrumental justifications, or from entering into cross-curricular projects where religion is consumed by other issues. This is evident in the current excitement to get into bed with the government’s SMSC agenda. It is also found in the RE Council’s recent subject review, which suggests that in order for RE to sustain itself in the 21^st century, RE academics should research the benefits of RE on social cohesion, school improvement and development, school ethos and pupil behaviour. If we do not justify our subject in academic terms, utility and relevance aside, we undermine its claims to a place on the crowded school timetable.

4. No agreed body of knowledge

Unlike other statutory subjects, RE escaped Gove’s curriculum reforms. In place of a National Curriculum, the RE Council (sixty groups with an interest in Religious Education) devised a new National Framework. However, unlike the History National Curriculum for example, the National Framework for RE fails to specify a single piece of knowledge that pupils should gain. It contains the phrase ‘pupils should be taught to’ but does not state a single fact that pupils should be taught about. Based on this document, local authorities draw up locally agreed syllabuses for schools in their area to follow. Again, these syllabuses do not denote any specific knowledge that should be learnt.

This knowledge vacuum, created by a lack of specified content and accompanied by a belief that the subject should be primarily aimed at personal development, leaves RE teachers, not least the 50% in secondary who are non-specialists (APPG, The Truth Unmasked, 2013), directionless and scraping the barrel of bad ideas to find something to teach. If they were to consult many of the vacuous RE textbooks of recent years, they would find ‘thinking points’, ‘discussion questions’ and oversized images to guide their planning. As such, with the front door wide open, the latest dubious fad to sweep through education, be it Thinking Hats, Brain Gym, NLP, Learning Styles or Emotional Intelligence, is welcomed with open arms into many RE classrooms. Even when they are not in full force, the relics of these disproven dogmas often cling on to RE, leeching the rigour and academia from it and confirming its perceived status as a soft subject.

Our lack of agreed subject matter also makes a mockery of our claim that RE is an important subject. How can we argue that RE is valuable if we do not know, agree or specify what pupils actually learn in it? It forces us to make weak utilitarian justifications based on the false presumption that virtues like emotional literacy or tolerance can be taught in a vacuum, detached from specific knowledge that might encourage pupils to reflect on and potentially develop these virtues.

Acknowledging our blind spot: Where do we go from here?

The road to RE’s crisis is paved with denial. There is no question that the Government’s failure to recognise the need to pay RE attention has done much told damage. Their support is unquestionably and urgently required in a number of areas. However to suggest it is only the Government who have not ‘realised the potential’ of RE misrepresents not only the findings of successive Ofsted reports, but also a weight of academic research revealing our internal crisis. RE has become dispensable because we have made it so. No amount of local authority funding, no place in the E Bacc, no accreditation of the short course, no reversal of academisation and free schools, can paper over the real crack. Our root problem is one that we must solve.

Denial aside, there is something more deeply concerning about the denialist rhetoric or blame narrative; it is eminently defeatist. It positions the RE community as weak victims, a persecuted minority, powerless to make a difference, entirely at the mercy of the government’s desire to trample on RE.  In doing so it maintains the status quo and permits low standards. This victim mentality proclaims a gospel of anxiety, defeatism and despair, where the RE community are impotent to affect any great change. Perhaps it is a reflection of the lack of Government attention, that such a narrative can go so unchallenged. It is hard to imagine Maths or English receiving an Ofsted report stating 60% of lessons are less than good and then undergo such insignificant challenge or change to its internal orthodoxies and incoherencies. Regardless, if we believe that the Government’s lack of attention renders us helpless, we will continue to be blown around by political winds until our subject is so rudderless, hollow and light that one final storm wipes it out.

The heart of our problem is a rejection of our heart. If RE is to be a rigorous, respected subject, we must reject the defeatist narrative, accept responsibility and turn our gaze inwards towards our neglect of its core, religion. We must reform our subject internally, from the inside out. Instead of simply the perpetual drone of the political drum, banging home the message that the Government don’t like us, we must take responsibility. Real change happens at the grassroots, by teachers and others in the RE community, who know and care about the integrity of RE. It is us who can alter the plight of our subject and give pupils the education they deserve.

We are already in possession of something more powerful than any government intervention could ever be. The phenomena at the heart of our subject should be the envy of teachers in every other subject in its ability to provoke, to inspire, to challenge, to transport pupils to other worlds, to broaden their horizons and make a difference beyond what can be measured in any government scale.

We have a diamond, but we have not regarded it as such. We have let it gather dust, believing it to be tired, boring, irrelevant, inaccessible. Rather than seeing it as our most valuable asset, the thing that gives our subject identity and purpose, we have viewed it as our Achilles’ heel, our thorn in the flesh, baggage that we are forced to carry around. As a result, our purpose has become confused and our subject slowly dismantled. In its place, we have erected a golden calf, a false, sacrilegious version of RE more in tune with what we think we need. If we can knock this golden calf down and wipe the dust from our diamond, its glare may perhaps just attract the attention we desire. We will be fighting with something worth fighting for, our commotion will have coherence, our public din will be worthy of recognition.

David Ashton is a secondary school RE teacher. He blogs about RE on thegoldencalfre.wordpress.com

Follow David on Twitter @thegoldencalfre

For my fourth blog I want to return to the issues which underlie some of the problems facing RE in schools, in particular the ‘confusion of purpose’.

There is an important question to be asked about the boundaries around the contribution of RE to spiritual development. Enthusiasts for spiritual development in RE are sometimes in danger of trespassing across these boundaries. We need to define carefully the distinctive way RE can support this important aspect of personal development.

Oddly, I think RE often spends too much time trying to help children and young people become spiritual at the expense of investigating and studying the idea of the spiritual as part of making sense of the world of religion and belief.

As a parent I expected a school to promote a ‘light touch’ approach to the spiritual development of my children appropriate to wider educational goals. I would look to the school to foster:

• self-confidence and self-esteem
• curiosity about the world and a fascination for learning
• a sense of the way learning can help children join up and see connections in their learning
• safe opportunities to explore emotions and feelings and develop a sense of empathy
• an ability to use different forms of creative expression
• an opportunity to examine and discuss different ideas about spirituality

What would others add to the list?

In the end spiritual development in an educational setting is about good teaching across the whole curriculum; it’s about a school having an ethos and sense of values which promote pupils ‘flourishing as human beings’.

How different children respond to these opportunities will depend heavily on the individual. For some it will come from great PE or maths teaching; for others it’s about the teacher who fosters a love of literature or a fascination with the natural world or technology.  On a personal note when I reflect on my own secondary education (different era!) –  it was the English, history and geography teachers who inspired a love of learning; it was maths that gave me a sense of self-esteem; and, it was PE, art and music that damaged my self-confidence and ability to express myself – they have a lot to answer for. And as for design technology (or as we called it, ‘woodwork’!) – just don’t get me started.

It is an interesting activity to invite friends and colleagues to reflect on what ‘did it for them’ in school!

So spiritual development is whole school, whole curriculum and it’s about great teaching. And in most schools I think it is pretty good. Its presence is not always described as ‘spiritual’ and as a result there is a danger that we sometimes try to invent something over and beyond what they already do well.

A big worry for me about RE is our tendency to feel that our subject needs to compensate for a perceived inadequacy in spiritual development in the wider curriculum and the rest of school life. I have become increasingly uneasy about the way various ‘Spirited…’ programmes are identified with RE. Spirited Art/Poetry/Photography projects sit on RE websites – Why and what next?  Spirited Maths; Spirited Technology: Spirited PE?

Is an over-enthusiasm for spiritual development amongst some in the RE world one of the reasons why the subject has become so confused about its purpose? Is there a danger that RE tries to move beyond a ‘light touch’ approach to spiritual development and engage in much more ‘high impact’ semi-confessional activity?

One school of thought argues that RE should go beyond the goal of ‘making sense’ of religion and belief. It argues, for example, that RE should use the perceived wisdom that lies at the heart of religion and belief to stimulate the spiritual development of pupils. In other words we try to use religion as a resource to help pupils develop their own spirituality. But this ignores the highly contested nature of that perceived ‘wisdom’.  Who decides what is wise and what is delusion? Is the attempt to use religious resources in this way in danger of trivialising religion – making your own rosary to remind you of special things in your life; designing your own special pilgrimage??

Are we in danger of trespassing too far into the private world of the pupils’ own spiritual life? We need to remind ourselves that the teachers’ standards do not require or expect us to have a highly developed personal spiritual life. I am sure teachers, including RE teachers, represent as wide a spectrum of spiritual awareness as the rest of the population. We shouldn’t ask too much of ourselves.

Is the idea that RE should have ‘high impact’ on pupils’ spiritual development part of a wider tendency for RE to take on too much; to become over-bloated? We see the same weakness in the attempt by RE to take into itself the study of huge cross-curricular social, economic and ethical  themes like poverty, medical ethics, human rights, fair trade. All at the expense of study of religion itself!

I am very aware I am in very dangerous territory here. I need to return to these questions in a future blog.

RE has limited curriculum time and resources. It’s a modest subject that needs to focus on its core task of helping pupils make sense of the world of religion and belief; to become effective as students of religion and belief. By trying to do too much don’t we end up dumbing down RE? This underlies that key finding of the 2013 Ofsted report that:

“Too often teachers thought they could bring depth to the pupils’ learning by inviting them to reflect on or write introspectively about their own experience rather than rigorously investigate and evaluate religion and belief.”

So how should we define the distinctive contribution of RE to spiritual development? My contention is that RE should be more modest in its claims to support spiritual development. Yes we should foster self-esteem, a fascination for learning.

But the really distinctive contribution of RE to spiritual development is an intellectual one. It is the main context in which pupils can engage in enquiries into the complex and highly contested issue of the relationship between religion, belief and spirituality. We need to give much more attention to getting beyond collecting facts and getting inside the relationship between religion and the spiritual.

The RE curriculum needs to include more opportunities to enquire into:

• the concept of the spiritual itself – what does the word mean and how is it connected to religion?
• the different ways in which religions try to invoke a sense of spirituality
• questions about whether you need to be religious to be spiritual and whether religious adherence can be a barrier to spiritual growth.
• the diverse ways each religion or belief engages with the idea of the spiritual – differences WITHIN a religion are often related to very different ways of thinking about spirituality rather than differences of doctrine.

I am very aware that thought needs to be given to how this is translated into practice especially in the early primary years. But I hope this helps us move towards some principles to define the professional boundaries around the relationship between RE and spiritual development.

The Church of England review of RE in Church schools

For my third blog I want to step aside from the debates about RE and focus on the publication last week of the Church of England’s report on RE in Church schools – Making a difference? A review of Religious Education in the Church of England . You can download at: https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/09/review-on-church-school-re-pledges-to-raise-standard-for-globally-important-subject.aspx

Forgive me if I am caught drifting back into Ofsted-speak!

It’s an important report – and not just because it was authored by your friendly blogger. It is the culmination of a survey undertaken earlier this year looking at RE in 60 Church of England schools. We had a great team undertaking the survey and I am immensely grateful to the heads, teachers, pupils and governors for their time and willingness to participate.

What is invaluable is that this helps us get a much more comprehensive picture of the ‘state of RE’ across the country complementing the Ofsted survey report published last year. I think it also represents and will help consolidate a sense of our subject community working more strongly together to improve RE. The report highlights a number of ‘boxed’ examples of Prime Practice – contexts where RE is flourishing.

A celebration

The findings about RE in Church secondary schools are really positive. 70% good or better and 25% outstanding! There was clear evidence of what can be achieved when RE is well-supported by senior leaders and resourced with well-qualified teachers and good curriculum time. The schools had largely withstood the impact of the recent Government policy. We saw some great teaching and students who valued and enjoyed the subject.

But the schools were not insulated from some of the issues facing RE in all secondary schools. Three obvious areas emerged:

• The inevitable GCSE problem – the need to try to improve the qualification, make it more rigorous and strengthen the focus on promoting religious literacy
• Improving the overall design of the RE curriculum seeing Key Stages 3 and 4 as a coherent whole.  In the words of the report ‘students were not always clear enough about the journey they were taking in developing their subject knowledge’. So, lots of interesting topics – but not quite sure how they all hung together to form a coherence journey.
• Assessment, assessment, assessment – how to live in a post-level world and how to avoid the mistakes of the levelling nightmare!

But still grounds to celebrate because these all point the way towards the whole RE community working together to address the issues.

A conundrum

The conundrum circulates around RE in the Church primary schools; only good or better in only about 40% of the schools and only outstanding in one school. The conundrum? The leaders and governors in the schools recognised that RE should be important; they usually provided decent curriculum time and resources; subject leaders were often very enthusiastic; RE was usually taught by the class teacher; and, most schools had had some kind of professional development in RE.

So, the context and provision for RE was much better than that found in many non-Church primary schools BUT the quality of the RE was no better! What emerged was that Church primary schools were not immune from the problems facing all primary schools.

Once again I’m going for a note of celebration – it points to the need for Church schools to work closely with all other schools to improve RE. We all face the same issues:

• Confusion about purpose – in some ways the muddle about the purpose of RE was compounded by confusions about the place of RE in a Church school.
• Improving leadership – with a stronger focus on high quality self-evaluation and improvement planning
• Strengthening the curriculum – doing fewer topics in more depth with more sustained and challenging learning
• Sorting out assessment – getting away from the level jungle and back to meaningful dialogue with children
• Making sure CPD is high quality and has a real impact in the classroom.

An opportunity

I want to keep going on the narrative of celebration and working together. What emerged from this survey was the way all schools, whether with a religious designation or not, share common concerns when it comes to RE. I think we knew it already but the report is a great opportunity, a real catalyst for working together.

And this just at the time when a raft of new professional development opportunities are surfacing – the RE professional community working together and doing it for themselves! The new and emerging hubbing; the RE Quality Mark; the RE Council’s Professional Development Portal; the Teach RE course; the resources of RE:ONLINE.

But there are some specific opportunities in the report. The section on Future Developments in the second half of the report is very positive about ways forward. These emerged from the schools we visited and the creative thinking of the survey team – I just wrote them down!

Four opportunities and tempters to get you to read the report:

• Working together to sort out the purpose of RE – the report has some original insights offering the intriguing analogy of a ball and socket joint to describe how RE can understand its place in the wider life of the school!
• Working together on curriculum design – not just curriculum builders plonking down one topic brick after another with no idea of the shape of the building – but real architects with a vision for designing a whole curriculum around the pupils’ learning journey.
• Working together to improve professional development – taking a much more strategic and sustained view of training.
• And a really distinctive opportunity coming from the Church of England – the notion of ‘thinking theologically’ using the art of theological enquiry as one key to raising the level of challenge in RE.

I would encourage you to read the report to see the whole picture.

Introduction

The first thing to say is that there are many ways of being a Christian and in this contribution I am going to limit myself to one perspective due to space and for the sake of clarity. I am going to approach spirituality from an Orthodox Christian perspective. Why? Because that is the one I know best and others need to speak for their own traditions.

There is only one Orthodox Christian spirituality

In his work Orthodoxy the theologian Paul Evdokimov states:

There is only one spirituality for all, without any distinction between bishops, monks and laymen, and the spirituality is monastic. (p287)

Evdokimov stresses here that there is no hierarchy when it comes to being spiritual. Bishops, priests and deacons are not closer to God because they serve in the sanctuary, in fact all of the early monks were lay people and most igoumen (leaders of monasteries) were not, and are not, ordained.  So what characterises the monastic life for Orthodox Christians? To understand this we first have to understand something else: the purpose of life itself.

The meaning of the incarnation

St Athanasius states that in Jesus Christ God became human so that humans can become god. We cannot become God as ‘God is’ but we can participate in the life of God so that we ourselves take on the character of ‘god’. Orthodox Christians refer to this as ‘theosis’. As baptised and chrismated Christians we are drawn into the very life of God and that life is one of community and communion. By the grace of the Holy Spirit we are united with Christ and are brought to the Father in an act of Trinitarian love. In 1 John 4:7 – 8 we are told to love one another because love comes from God and that if we do not love we are not of God because God is love. It is into this life of love that we are drawn through the mysteries, especially the mystery of the Eucharist and communion.

The purpose of life is to be united with God for this we were created. It is obvious, though, that there are things that stand in our way. As St Paul says in his letter to the Philippians (2:12): ‘you must work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’ Of course we cannot do that on our own and St Paul goes on to state (2:13): ‘for it is God who works in you….’

We are not alone

Metropolitan Kallistos of Diocletia reminds us of the early Church dictum: ‘one Christian, no Christian’. As Christians we belong to the Body and the Bride of Christ, the Church. We do that through the membership of our local church in communion with our bishop who is in communion with all other Orthodox bishops. When we go along to the local church we are reminded that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) when we look at the icons that adorn the walls, are on stands and on the iconostasis. Constantly we have the prayers of the Theotokos, the saints and the angelic host bringing us closer to Christ. In our homes we have an icon corner before which we say our morning and evening prayers. In the prayers, examples and writings of the saints we have guides on the way. There are others too, members of our community who encourage us through their example and prayers. Together we keep the fasts and celebrate the feasts of this people of God, bound together in the bond of life.

There are also those who are advanced on the spiritual path. Often these are monks and nuns who are perfecting the Christian life of prayer and service. It is common for an Orthodox Christian to have a spiritual father or mother. Rarely are these ordained ministers of the church, and there is an important distinction and link to be made between the institutional churches and the charismatic Church. It is through binding ourselves to a spiritual father or mother that we progress on our journey to unity with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, in whose name we were baptised.

Working out our salvation

There are three distinct activities that define Orthodox Christian spirituality and the first of these is encountering God in prayer. Prayer is the oxygen of the soul, without it the soul withers and dies. Prayer comes in many forms. There is the prayer of the Liturgy, the services in which we take part. There is the prayer of devotion, the prayer book we carry around and dip into during the day to set us on the right track. There is prayer of the heart, that constant prayer which enables us to stand before God in humility. None of this is possible without the Holy Spirit who prays within us calling out Abba/Father (Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6). Some Christians are so dedicated to this life of prayer that they retreat to the desert to perfect this life, such as St Anthony of Egypt, St John Climacus, St Gregory Palamas or Matthew the Poor.

The second activity is reading the Scriptures. In the Scriptures we hear the Word of God to His people over a period of thousands of years, and we are those people. Reading and meditating on Jesus in the Gospels is especially important for how can we become like Christ if we don’t know what Christ is like. This reading, though, is not simply done as an individual it is a reading of the Church and by the Church. Knowing the great commentaries is also important. Even those who disappeared into the desert remained a part of the Church and it was the people of God who allowed and encouraged them to follow the path of the spiritual athlete. Encountering the Triune God in Scripture is key to our own and our community’s spiritual development.

The third activity is asceticism. One thing that seems to separate Orthodox Christians from others is the amount of fasting we do. Asceticism, here normally fasting from food and drink – or certain types of food and drink – and other things that might be good and desirable, is not an end in itself. Rather it is a means to an end and that end is union with God in Christ. What we tend to forget is that we are not just spiritual beings like the angels we are also physical beings. In that God the Word took on ‘flesh’ in Jesus Christ ‘matter’ becomes united with God. Hence, our bodies are important. For the period of Great Lent leading up to Pascha (Easter), for forty days before Christmas, from the Monday after the first Sunday after Pentecost to 28^th June and from the 1^st to the 15^th August we fast. We fast most Wednesdays and Fridays and from midnight before we receive communion. This is not because the body is bad but because it needs training, in this way it can move from being good to being glorious, transfigured.

This worldly spirituality

All of the above is likely to lead the reader to believe that Orthodox Christians are not of this world. In some ways this is true, in the Gospel of St John (18:36) Jesus tells us that His kingdom is not of this world, but the test of our spiritual life is the quality of our love for others. In St Matthew’s Gospel we are taught that when we respond to the needs of the marginalised we are encountering Christ (see: Matthew 25: 31 – 46). Genesis teaches us that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God and therefore by meeting the needs of those that society has rejected we are restoring the image of God in the world and becoming like God in the process. Any person pertaining to be spiritual whist rejecting the needs of their fellow human beings is a liar or deluded. Even when St John Climacus wrote his classic work The Ladder of Divine Assent for monks seeking perfection he recognised that there is no spiritual life for the self-obsessed who ignore the needs of others.

Freedom without anarchy

The aim of the spiritual life is to be free. Free not to do what one wants but freedom to serve. This freedom is rooted in love, as the Blessed Augustine of Hippo states: ‘love and do what you will’. Of course if you do love you cannot will to do that which love would not do. Hence, the truly spiritual person embodies love, the love that is God. It is not a freedom from the body, as God the Word became Flesh, but freedom from that aspect of ‘flesh’ that leads us away from God and brings us into conflict with others – rooted in pride according to  St John Climacus. This freedom allows for real variety, there is no single way of being an Orthodox Christian – as can be seen from the lives of St Simon Stylites, St Mary of Egypt, St David of Hermopolis, Fr Alexander Menn. Rather, in communion with each other we are called to follow Christ to see where that will take us, ultimately to be united with each other in the life of the Triune God.

Torah at the heart of what it is to be Jewish

To be a Jew is to live in relation to G-d’s[1] revelation given to Moses, the Torah. The Torah, though, isn’t simply the first five books of the Jewish Bible it encompasses the whole of the Jewish tradition – a tradition that is growing and developing even as you read this. What does living ‘in relation to….’ actually mean? Perhaps it is best summed up as: being faithful to living the Torah in the tradition of the rabbis. As Jews we are not individuals seeking some sort of religious-spiritual path we exist as a community, the people of Israel.

How does the Torah define this people?

In the Torah we are described as a people ‘set apart’ a ‘holy people’ and we exist to witness that G-d created the world and has expectations of all humans. As Jews we do not exist simply for ourselves, like some holy club, we are there as a prophetic witness – a living message. Of course, we don’t always get it right and like all other humans we are flawed and need to return (teshuvah) constantly to our roots – the G-d of Israel.

Our holiness is primarily defined by our keeping of the commandments of G-d passed onto us through our sacred tradition. It is be studying these that we can start to define what a distinctively Jewish spirituality is. Given the space available, though, I am going to focus on some key areas.

The home

In many ways Judaism is a domestic religion. The home is set apart (holy) in a way that is rarely found in other religious traditions. In part this is because we have lived two thousand years without a land or a Temple, and even though we now have a land we still have no Temple. When the altar in the Temple was destroyed the family table took its place. The family table becomes a place of encounter with family members, friends, guests and strangers – as was the table of Abraham and Sarah as can be seen in Genesis 18. As such it becomes a place of meeting with the Living G-d. Meals are surrounded by blessings of thanks – the development of an attitude of thanksgiving is key to Jewish spirituality – and stories as well as conversation. The great Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (z”l)[2] used to say: Maimonides, Nachmanides and Rashi were frequent guests at his childhood table.

The home is so important that on each doorpost (with the exception of the bathroom-toilet) there is a mezuzah containing passages from the Torah. The key message of the rabbis is that holiness is not something extraordinary but ordinary in every sense. This is seen most keenly on the Shabbat. In many ways that Shabbat has kept the Jews more than the Jews have kept Shabbat as Rabbi Hugo Gryn (z”l) was prone to say. The setting aside of sacred time in the ordinary of the home sanctifies the whole family and all that the family does.

The Beit Knesset

We are not simply families who are disconnected, though, we live in communities. The Beit Knesset is the ‘house of meeting’ and is also called the synagogue. Its primary purpose is to bring Jews together and it does this for a number purposes. Firstly, the study of Torah. It is only by studying Torah that we know how to live according to G-d’s command. Encountering G-d in the Torah is done in community. When studying the Talmud it is usual to do this with a friend. By learning passages from the Talmud and arguing about them and checking each others recall and understanding of them do we get to meet the Living G-d of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the rabbis. Study isn’t simply there as an academic exercise it is there to transform the ones who study – transforming us to become ‘ben Torah’, literally a son of the Torah. The ben Torah is one who lives the Torah in their everyday relationships – what Soloveitchik calls the ‘Halakhic man’.

Secondly, for prayer. Orthodox synagogues where there is a large community hold three services a day on weekdays and four on Shabbat. Often these services are combined so people aren’t constantly going back and forth. The purpose of prayer in the Jewish tradition, though, isn’t about trying to get what we want from G-d. The Jewish word for prayer (Tefillah) comes from the verb meaning: to judge oneself. The key question a Jew is required to ask themselves at prayer is: can I stand before G-d on the basis of the sort of person I am and the things I have done? If not then I need to change my life, if so: how can I become more perfect in my service of the G-d of Israel? Daily prayer in community, where possible, is a responsibility – it is about being an adult. It is not about how I feel or the feelings it gives me, it is more important than that. Most of the prayers are made up of blessings, further cultivating the middah (attribute) of thankfulness.

Tikkun olam

As a community, though, we cannot simply look to ourselves – although persecution has often meant that we have had to focus on surviving and social restrictions have had the consequence that we have not been able to engage fully with the world. When we are able to we have a duty to make the world a better place. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (z”l) said that we should leave the world a better place than we found it. Engaging with others becomes key. The Torah commands us more than thirty-five time to ‘love the stranger’ but only once to ‘love our neighbour’. Loving our neighbour is logical because we share our present and future but why love the stranger? The Jewish mystical tradition (Kabbalah) teachers us that G-d is a stranger and that we discover G-d in that encounter. In fact Jewish folk law often identifies the stranger with the Prophet Elijah who at times comes to test the hearts of people. To this extent Jewish spirituality is wholly practical. The Rebbe of Kotzk told his followers: do not look after your own body and another man’s soul; rather look after your own soul and another man’s body. As Jews we don’t seek to make converts and we believe that people can be ‘right with G-d’ without being Jewish but we do believe that we must work for the good of the whole of humanity and the environment.

So what?

Jewish spirituality doesn’t look very spiritual to some people, it looks far too earthy. If anything Jewish spirituality is about adding a dimension to the life of all of us in the context of a community. It is about the encounter with G-d through faithfulness to the Torah and it is about being constantly grateful – the rabbis teach that we should try to find one hundred occasions for thanking G-d everyday – there is even a blessing for seeing ugly things!

Ultimately, Jewish spirituality is about the meaning and purpose of a people. It is not always a good people or a faithful people and there are individuals who let us down. It is a people, though, striving to become holy in all the right ways. Even non-religious Jews want, on the whole, to make that positive contribution which leaves the world better than they found it. A danger for all Jews is ‘spiritual nostalgia’ – sometimes referred to a Bubba and Chicken Soup – and this is to be avoided. Digging into our roots and looking at where we are going gives us a framework for a spiritual response to the world which at once transforms us and the world at the same time.

All narratives “have a curious and even dangerous power….. It is such a great responsibility that it’s best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.” Vera Nazarian, Dreams of the Compass Rose.

You wait all year for an RE blog to come along and then two arrive together!

I am delighted to see the arrival on the scene of David Ashton’s brilliant new RE blog ‘The Golden Calf’! See thegoldencalf.wordpress.com and follow on twitter @thegoldencalfre

Particularly delighted because so much of what he says makes such good sense. His insights into the messages ‘behind’ the 2013 Ofsted report, to which he makes extensive reference, are excellent! I will return to this later…….

It’s almost a year since Ofsted published that report on RE. I recall the relief when it became obvious that the report, Religious Education: realising the potential, had received good press from the media and the RE community. And still thrilled to see that its core ‘narrative’ is pressing forward.

That narrative was well received. And let us be under no illusions. Ofsted reports, for all their survey evidence, are interpretations and judgements forming a story. Whether we ‘did it right’ – only time will tell.

Stories have a curious and even dangerous power; they can change the world. RE has its own narratives designed to help make sense of our situation. As a community so often feeling undervalued, our stories are created to help us make sense of those feelings. We demonise those who threaten us; we make heroes of our supporters. We believe we have nuggets of gold that the world fails to recognise.

Over the past year I have thought a lot about this idea of the narratives of RE. Two questions have dominated my most recent thinking.

1. Are we in danger of pursuing a negative public narrative which may both deceive and damage us?

The list of negativity can seem endless. RE under attack; blaming the Government for all our ills. The EBacc saga, the way GCSE Short course no longer counts, the impact of academisation on local determination; the bursary scandal, teacher education cuts; exclusion from national funding for the review of the curriculum.

The messages we are putting out into the public arena are often alarming:

• Why religious education is letting our children down
• Urgent action needed to curb GCSE decline
• Government policy has unintended negative consequences for RE
• RE subject to rank discrimination over training bursaries

I am under no illusion – there are problems out there. But do we need to take care in the way we tell the story? Is there a real danger that we offer a public counsel of despair; that we drive away potential trainee teachers by putting out a message that the subject is in terminal crisis? Would you choose to train to teach a subject which is in such a crisis? Do we appear to be fighting enemies on all fronts? Will the Government see us as crying wolf?

There a slightly different public narrative which leads us to a different place and will enable us to pick our fights more carefully?

A big public headline is that full course GCSE numbers continue to rise. It is still more popular than the other humanities. RE is proving remarkably resilient and fears about the EBacc do not appear to have materialised. Pupils like RE; demand is strong for the gold standard full course. The fallout from the Trojan Horse affair has given RE purchase again in the Government’s educational agenda. We need more teachers to meet this demand; bring back bursaries. This is a subject with a future; it is worth training to teach RE.

Do we need to let some things go? Isn’t the short course a busted flush? It was always suspect as a qualification. The drive to create a course full of relevant ‘issues’ distorted RE. It did a job for a while and helped accredit the statutory subject. But the culture has shifted.

There is a muddle at the heart of RE which is causing us difficulties. Our statutory position is creating more and more tensions. We need a really robust debate about the law. Doesn’t it undermine our argument for being in the EBacc? Hasn’t it prevented us from accessing the discipline created by the review of the National Curriculum? Hasn’t it tied RE to a principle of local determination which is collapsing around us? Doesn’t it force us to try to defend compulsion at Key Stage 4 when the educational justification is fragile? The RE Council for England and Wales is rightly pressing for a new settlement; for a thorough review of RE’s statutory position in order to strengthen its place in the curriculum.

If I were to pick a fight with the Government and DfE, it would be on two main fronts. First, and more generally, their failure to sort out the legal mess that plagues RE. Second, and more specifically, their refusal to face up to the evidence about teacher supply.

Change the narrative so we can change the world! Pick the battles. RE is popular, it’s relevant to the Government’s agenda, GCSE numbers flourish …… we need more teachers and we need a new settlement for RE.

2. Are we in danger of failing to pursue the crucial internal narrative about getting our own house in order to ensure we are credible?

One of the dangers faced by a community that feels under-valued and threatened is that it finds it difficult to reflect on its own shortcomings.

The Golden Calf blog has its focus on addressing the internal issues which face us as a professional community. His first three blogs echo the underlying messages in RE: Realising the Potential. Yes …. the Government could do more to support RE, BUT we need to work more effectively together to improve the subject and make it credible.

Three quotes from the Golden Calf serve to identify the issues we need to address:

Discussing the lack of religious literacy highlighted by Ofsted the blog says:

There is a widely held view within the RE community that the chief purpose of RE is character formation or spiritual and moral development, rather than intellectual advancement….. As a result, RE lessons are reduced to a setting for developing ‘soft skills’ detached from a deep or rigorous understanding of religion.

Talking about many GCSE courses the blog is uncompromising:

This is not Religious Education. It does not even constitute teaching religion through the back door. Religion is out in the garden, overgrown with weeds, residing in the doghouse. For exam boards to deprive pupils of a broad and deep knowledge of religions by allowing a narrow study of one religion, or of social issues, runs counter to the stated aims of their specifications. If they are serious about their claim that RE promotes values such as tolerance and appreciation of diversity, they must create a GCSE that enables this.

Exploring assessment and the way to live in a post-level world the blog suggests:

The idea that pupils should make progress is a basic assumption of educators, but unless we carefully define what we mean by progress we quickly run into problems. The use of levels to regularly assess pupils stems from a widely unchallenged but misguided notion that a child should make incremental, linear progress as studiers of a subject and that this is tangibly measurable. If we are to escape the problems of levels then a paradigm shift in our understanding of progress is required. Progress in an academic subject is something that happens as pupils master an increasing number of distinct bodies of knowledge.

And maybe the battles that we can win lie inside the world of RE. The fire next time!

Alan Brine, formerly an HMI and Ofsted’s subject lead for RE, is now enjoying his liberation and is a lead consultant for Culham St Gabriel’s, working on the regional strategy for professional development of RE teachers. Here in RE Matters he will be contributing a regular, hard-hitting and well-informed blog, addressing the key developmental issues in RE as he sees them.

Free at last! It was a great privilege working for Ofsted BUT the greater privilege was the opportunity to visit schools and talk to teachers and pupils about RE. The lead RE role also enabled me to join in much of the work that was going on nationally to support and improve our subject. But Ofsted is a cautious and nervous animal that discourages too much blue sky thinking. So leaving the big O is an opportunity to share some of my wider thinking about RE. I am grateful to RE:ONLINE for giving me this opportunity. The link to the regional strategy is one I want to exploit! I hope to bring ‘news from the front’ sharing the good work that is emerging from the hubs.

I intend that this will become a regular blog about RE. So where to start? The agenda is long. Some of the threads we might explore are:

•  Whether RE is responding quickly enough to the rapidly changing social reality of religion?

•  How to face the assessment challenges of a post-level world?

•  How close are we to resolving the tensions around the purpose of RE?

•  What does it mean to be a great curriculum design architect?

•  Can we resolve the statutory swamp that threatens RE?

•  Why ‘learning from religion’ was so annoying?

•  Would RE benefit from a little free market economics?

•  What kind of ‘reading matter’ do we need to be religiously literate?

Blogging – somewhere between proper research (which sounds too much like hard work) and tweeting (a form of low life to which I find myself mildly addicted!).

I use the words ‘regular blog’ rather than weekly as it lets me off the hook of being too disciplined. But what kind of blogging would be useful?

•  An opportunity for a grumpy frustrated ex-HMI to get a few things off his chest (too indulgent)

•  A piece sharing resources and up-to-date information about RE matters (too dull and done better elsewhere)

•  A social networking blog with advice about current cultural and lifestyle trends (far too indulgent)

In Adichie’s most recent book ‘Americanah’ the main character is a blogger who writes about issues related to racism and black identity. Her blog is referred to as an “irreverent, hectoring, funny and thought-provoking voice to create a space for real conversations about an important subject.”

So that’s the aspiration – to try to create a space for real conversations. And hopefully offer some left field thinking and a bit of irreverence designed to prompt us to get stuck into the debate. I hope readers will enjoy and respond to the provocation. After years cooped up inside the Ofsted hothouse, the chance for a little kite flying and playing the devil’s advocate attracts.

Others might like to suggest areas to explore…. and what about guest bloggers – why not? It would be good to be joined by others who want the opportunity to share their thoughts. Just get in touch if you want to write a piece:  Alan@cstg.org.uk

The one thing that most people know about humanists is that we don’t believe in gods or goddesses. In fact, as the most recognisable non-religious worldview, you could say this is one of our defining features. But Humanism is a positive lifestance – It is an approach to life based on reason and our common humanity, recognising that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone.

Most humanists find that the concepts of gods or goddesses simply don’t make sense – the idea isn’t relevant in daily life and the decisions we take.

Humanists come in many forms – some of us are atheists, a term which originated from the Greek atheos, meaning ‘without god(s)’ and some of us are agnostic meaning ‘without knowledge’, but many of us choose to describe ourselves humanist because we want to define ourselves by our positive beliefs (‘I am a humanist’) rather than by a negative term (‘I am not religious/I don’t believe in gods or goddesses’).

While humanists reject the belief in gods or goddesses, many humanists want to understand why some people believe in them and if this should this impact on how we live our lives.

The origin of gods and goddesses

Throughout recorded human history many people have used the idea of the supernatural to explain the workings of the natural world around them.

It’s not surprising that people might explain natural phenomenon using supernatural ideas – without greater knowledge of the natural world it would have been difficult to explain why the sun rose and set, or the tide moved. A lot of these explanations, especially sun-worship, have influenced modern religions such as Christianity (for example, the symbol of Sol Invictus, the Roman Sun-God, becoming the halo over Christian Saints at the order of Constantine, when he moved the holy day from Sabbath to SUNday). 

Humanism and ‘Ultimate Reality’

Humanists turn to science when it comes to thinking about whether there is an ultimate reality or truth about existence and whether that might ever be known by human beings. The term ‘ultimate reality’ has religious overtones (some definitions state that it is a supreme or fundamental power reality or else hint that it is something beyond the natural world – that it exists in a supernatural world or there is a second layer to reality). Humanists use evidence and reason to understand the world around them, and there is no evidence to suggest that there is some supernatural ‘second layer’ to reality. We can use science to measure, understand, and explain the world around us in terms of it being a natural place. Some might say this is a materialist view of the world – a view that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena (like our thoughts) and consciousness, are the result of material interactions. However, all the impressive advances in science of the past century have found no evidence whatsoever that there is anything beyond the physical universe. Even the strange theory of quantum mechanics, so often wrongly invoked to explain all manner of pseudoscientific and paranormal nonsense, does not propose any deeper layer of reality beyond the physical, even if that reality at the microscopic level is forever beyond the grasp of our scientific instruments.

Humanism and science

Through scientific enquiry our knowledge and understanding of the natural work and the universe has increased, and with this many people’s view of gods and goddesses has altered. Many religions have changed their explanations of fundamental subjects such as the origin of humans or the movement of the planets, and most people have a natural view of how the universe began and how life on earth evolved.

Of course, some religions and people still firmly adhere to a supernatural explanation of the world – for example, young earth creationism ignores evidence that proves that Earth is over 4.5 billion years old. However, increasingly people are adopting a natural view of the world, and fewer people today believe that religious books are literally true.

What do we mean by gods or goddesses?

The word god means different things to different people. Some may think it means a loving ‘Father’, others a universal spirit, or a force that set things going. Some think gods and goddesses can and will intervene in our lives if we pray, meditate, or sacrifice.

Some say that there is a common denominator: a single god about whom the various religions have different beliefs. But that does not seem to be the case in practice. If people believe different things about god – for some god is male and a person; others say that god is a cosmic force and sexless; some say god is loving and good, some say god is purely celestial, while others think god is human or superhuman…. then the god they believe in is not the same god, and their beliefs contradict each other.

We cannot discuss whether or not gods or goddesses exist until we are all clear about what is meant. Some of the most common arguments for the existence of a god are below, with a humanist perspective on the argument.

Argument 1 – The Argument from Design

“Surely the regular movement of the planets and the arrangement of the cosmos must be the work of an intelligent designer?” 

This argument is usually called ‘The Argument from Design’. It comes from ancient Greece, especially Aristotle, but was taken over by Christian thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas, and Catholics have been taught it ever since.

This argument has big problems. Firstly, there isn’t much order in the universe, but an increasing tendency towards chaos. The universe is also expanding, rather than keeping to a particular design.

Secondly, this argument assumes that order has to be designed, and can’t just occur naturally. But the way things happen to be will give them some characteristic features, which may appear as order.

Very often, patterns follow from the nature of the thing in question. We know that a spider doesn’t have a planning intelligence – the pattern of its web has arisen through millions of years of evolution by natural selection. A shaken jar of soil and water settles to a highly ordered pattern with larger particles at the bottom, then finer particles, then liquid – and no designer is involved at all.

Argument 2 – The Ontological Argument

“If you are able to think of a perfect Being you must believe in his existence, because if he didn’t exist he wouldn’t be perfect.”

This argument is usually called ‘The Ontological Proof’. Ontology is the study of the philosophy of being. This argument is similar to saying: because something is, it is. We have to be on the look-out for arguments that go around in circles and actually prove nothing. Words such as ‘ontological’ can make something sound profound , but beware!

This argument comes from St Anselm in the 11th century. St Thomas Aquinas rejected it… so not even all the Saints were in agreement. Later, Descartes revived it, and it has been taught ever since.

It’s the sort of argument that will convince those who desperately want to be convinced. If we think about UFOs in these terms: if you can think of a perfect UFO, then it must exist, because if it didn’t exist it wouldn’t be perfect.

Another version of the argument says, ‘Because god is perfect he must have all possible attributes.’ Presumably then god is bad as well as good visible and invisible… This idea is full of contradictions.

Argument 3 – The ‘First Cause’ Argument

“Everything that happens has a cause. But something must have happened in the first place to start the chain of causation moving. This ‘First Cause’ is what we call god.”

This argument is usually called ‘The First Cause’. God created everything and started it moving; created the ancestors of all living species…  (In 1996 this was suddenly updated by the Catholic Church to incorporate evolution).

So, do we need a First Cause? And if so, how do we know it was god?

Logically, if you argue that every cause has a cause, you must face the question: what caused the First Cause? In other words, who or what made god? The Christian response is that god created the chain of causation when he created the universe. God did not need a cause, since causes are something he created.

But if god didn’t need a cause, perhaps the universe didn’t need one either. If god had pre-existed for an infinite time before he created the universe, what was it that caused him to change his mind and create it? If the pre-existing god was perfect without being a creator, why did he decide to become a creator?

Even if we did decide to say there was a First Cause, what reason would there be for thinking that this was some kind of god, rather than a great explosion, or cosmic matter or energy? What evidence is there that such a First Cause would have carried on eternally and still be in existence today? The fact that science hasn’t explained everything about the origin of the universe is not a reason for assuming a First Cause and calling it god.

Argument 4 – The Moral Argument

“Because morality exists, there must be god.” 

This argument is usually called ‘The Moral Argument’. The philosopher Kant demonstrated that the previous three arguments weren’t valid, but cautiously supported this one. He said that our moral nature makes it necessary for us to believe in god – he carefully avoided saying that morality means that god exists.

Modern research looks at ‘evolutionary psychology’ and is getting closer to a full account of how our values and moral systems arose from the evolution of human nature. 

Argument 5 – Argument from Belief

“God exists because people believe in him.”

By the same token, god doesn’t exist because people don’t believe in him. Everyone has their own ‘reality’, and where groups of people share their belief about what is real, then it gathers more force. From a theological viewpoint, however, it makes little sense to look at the existence of god merely as a matter of opinion, as this argument does.

Sometimes the argument stresses the number of people who believe in god or goddesses (whatever the sort they believe in). It’s about consensus of opinion, and it’s a weak argument.

Enough people have believed in Santa Claus during their childhood, but it didn’t have any bearing on his existence. Years ago, almost everyone believed the earth was flat and at the centre of the universe… but this didn’t make it true!

If there is evidence, we can say it is a widely-held rational belief – such as believing in icebergs… I’ve never seen one, but I’ve read reports of them from people I trust, seen them on television, know what they are made of, and have seen similar lumps of ice in drinks.

Argument 6 – The Personal Argument

“But I’ve had a religious experience.”

This argument is usually called ‘The Personal Argument’. Many research projects have examined religious experiences. So far there is no scientifically verifiable evidence that such experiences reveal consistent evidence about gods or goddesses.

These revelations about gods or goddesses are often mutually exclusive – they cannot all be right, though each person is convinced that their personal experience has shown them the true path.

Argument 7 – The ‘purpose’ Argument

“Without god there’s no purpose to life.”

As it stands, saying that without gods or goddesses there’s no purpose or meaning to life is neither evidence nor proof. There is also plenty of evidence of intelligent beings (people) giving meaning and purpose to their lives without help from the supernatural.

Argument 8 – God’s Test Argument

“God won’t let us discover proof of his existence, because he wants us to have faith.” 

Based on an argument from the philosopher Kant, this seems to be only an opinion or a clever way with words. Like many other arguments, it isn’t evidence and it isn’t proof. You could also say that faith would be even more important if we proved that gods or goddesses didn’t exist.

Argument 9 – God as ‘force’

“God is a force beyond time and space, creating the underlying rationality of the universe.”

You will find that many scientists who study the universe are agnostic or atheist, and humanist. But there are some who believe in gods or goddesses. Their view is very different from the gods of religions’ scriptures, and is often abstract. Again, I would not see this as any sort of proof. Of course there are many things that we don’t yet know. But where the religious physicists put the word ‘god’, humanists are happy to leave a question mark. The more abstract the concept of god – ‘beyond time and space’, ‘cannot be described in terms that humans would understand’ –  the less it can be said to be a proof of god’s existence.

STOP! Just look at the suffering in the world…

Apart from the lack of evidence for gods or goddesses, the strongest arguments against their existence is the whole question of evil and suffering. Many religious people have times when they seriously doubt their faith in gods or goddesses.

When they consider horrific events like the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004, they find it difficult to believe in a god who is all-loving and all-powerful.

Perhaps god is either not good, or not powerful? But that would go against the teaching of most religions. And if god is cruel, why should people worship? Do they want a cruel god to bring about more cruelty? Perhaps god simply doesn’t intervene in human lives? This is like the belief of ‘Deists’, who think that god never reveals himself to us, and so won’t intervene to stop bad events. In this case, there is little point in prayer or worship.

Perhaps god doesn’t care about us? Once again, why worship? Why pray? This is a debate that could go on for pages.

A recent convert shares his journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity:

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ (John 1: 38 – 39)

How it began

In 2004 I was invited to meet with my local Greek Orthodox community at the end of Divine Liturgy. Hating to be late anywhere I turned up early, I was also unsure exactly where the church was. I wandered into the service to find nowhere to sit, not because there wasn’t space but because there weren’t any chairs. In the middle of the church was a stand with a number of icons on it, next to it there were candles burning. All around me there were pictures and in front of me there was a screen with doors open and two priests leading the service. To the right was a choir of three women. The rest of the space was filled with people. These people seemed to move around, there were children crawling between legs and there was an intense sense of prayer and devotion. I felt that I had stumbled into something that I couldn’t quite put into words.

At the meeting I met Orthodox Christians from across the world, Greeks, Arabs, Russians, Romanians as well as local people from the UK. There were also other non-Orthodox there too from a variety of religious traditions.

A niggle

From that time on I had a desire to return to find out more. I didn’t feel that I could simply drop in again so I started to read. I bought a number of books and started to read. Some of the books were introductions to Orthodox, some were about the Orthodox life of prayer and the liturgy, and others were on Orthodox theology and ethics. This reading I disguised as simply informing myself about a Christian tradition where I had very little experience or knowledge.

Part of my work and family commitments take me away from home and I thought to myself that perhaps my experience of Orthodoxy was atypical so I visited other Orthodox churches, some Greek (in England and Greece), some Russian (in England), one Romanian (in Italy) and a cathedral in Finland. The more I attended Orthodox churches the more at home I felt. No one ever asked me if I was Orthodox or not and no one asked me about my background or beliefs. There was never a sense of pressure. I did, though, learn how to light candles, cross myself and generally blend in.

Disturbing questions

The more I read and visited churches the more disturbed I became about who and what I was. To understand this you’d have to know that I’m Jewish and a community leader as well. People associate me with being Jewish – a very public face. I had a deep feeling that I could no longer lead Jewish worship or Torah study and slowly began to withdraw from the community. My family was bemused. I felt that I was in danger of betraying others whilst trying to be true to myself. It became something to be hidden from others. I used pressure of work to explain my change of involvement and found myself replacing my Siddur with an Orthodox Christian prayer book. It was not until 2012, eight years on, that I broached the subject of becoming an Orthodox Christian.

I also started to think of my relationship to other Christian denominations. Perhaps it was Jesus that I was attracted to as opposed to a denomination. I started visiting other churches and experiencing their services. Somehow, though, other churches didn’t seem quite right.

Visiting the priest

There came a point where I wanted to be more than a visitor to Orthodox churches but to be part of the Orthodox Church. The priest’s first question about what this would do to my family and what did my wife think. He told me that the church wasn’t about breaking up families. It was only after my wife had ‘given permission’ that any serious conversation could begin. Months passed and nothing happened, formally. I started going to services when I could. I went back to the parish priest and we started a formal process. Given my ‘status’ in the Jewish community the Archbishop was approached for guidance, as was a more local Bishop. At the beginning of Great Lent 2014 I became a catechumen.

I was given more reading and started to explore more and more what being Orthodox meant in practice. I also was recommended to approach a sponsor, someone who’d support me by answering questions and standing by me when I was received into the Church. Father recommended an Orthodox Christian from Syria.

Prayer, fasting and alms giving

Before Great Lent started I began to keep Orthodox Christian discipline in regard to fasting. During Lent I was vegan + (plus no wine or cooking oil most days), with the exception of the Feast of the Annunciation and Palm Sunday when I ate fish. Whenever possible I attended the Lenten Services. Each Sunday Gospel during Lent is intended for those who are to be baptised, chrismated and receive the mystery of communion.

Being the only vegan + in the house was challenging but not impossible. In fact that was nothing really in relation to what I had to do in Holy Week. On the Monday of Holy Week after the Bridegroom Service I had to go to confession. This was in the body of the church sitting next to the priest on the bench at the side. No box and not hidden away. Where to start was the first issue and where to stop the second. Under the guidance of the priest it went well.

The Pascha (Easter) Service

My reception was to be at the Pascha Service which started at 9.30 pm on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday morning. It was my, and my family’s, first experience of an Orthodox Pascha – I hadn’t told them that it would not finish for over three hours! It is not the place to go into the details of the service and I am still reflecting on what happened and how it felt. One thing that attracted me to Orthodoxy, as opposed to other expressions of Christianity, was the focus on the Resurrection as opposed to the Cross, not that Cross is absent. At the service I really did experience the deep joy of the Resurrection, especially when I received communion.

A new beginning

I realised on Holy Pascha (Easter Sunday) that far from arriving I was just setting off. I had come and seen, as in the Gospel, and I have found myself following Jesus. I have written about becoming an Orthodox Christian but not really about becoming one with Christ. What attracted me to Orthodoxy was its emphasis on unity with God through Christ. The emphasis on encounter and prayer and the simplicity and humility in the people I met set me on a path that I hope will lead to God to perfecting those attributes in me. Through the mysteries (sacraments), through the action of the Holy Spirit I hope to become more and more Christ like. I know that this will be a struggle. At the moment I am still in the first tender steps of my Orthodoxy and my relationship with God. My ‘Godfather’ has a new child, and I have two new sisters (and my Arabic is improving as is my Greek).

And finally

My family still can’t quite make sense of my conversion but they are supportive. My friends meet the news with a range of responses. I feel that after a decade I am where I should be and am prepared for the next stage. At no time did I feel pressured to become Orthodox and at the liturgy I proclaimed that this was something that I did of my own free will. In fact I was never made to feel lacking or sinful, which doesn’t mean that I don’t experience my own sinfulness. This lack of emotional manipulation that I had experienced in some other Christian churches enabled my to make a decision that was for positive reasons. Put simply to become a disciple of Jesus Christ. I came, I saw, I followed and am following still.

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.