Viewing archives for Archive

A call to action on the government’s Green Paper, the Integrated Communities Strategy https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/integrated-communities-strategy-green-paper

‘I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.’ (As part of RE:Online’s response strategy, there will be an honourable mention for the first person to tweet the correct source for this quote, and a free drink at the next national RE conference.)

Everybody knows things are bad. In 2010 the government took its foot off the pedal of community cohesion. They repeatedly weakened RE by excluding it from the Ebacc and the national curriculum review. In 2016 they blundered into a referendum which unleashed the hellish spectacle of open racism, xenophobia and hate speech towards minority religions, among others. The heightened levels of poisonous speech have still not gone back to ‘normal’; and some doubt if they will any time soon.

Our country is deeply divided – by age, geography, religion, culture, and much else. Now it seems that the government has belatedly woken up to the danger. In response to Dame Louise Casey’s 2016 review of opportunity and integration (see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-casey-review-a-review-into-opportunity-and-integration) the government has developed a policy Green Paper – an intention to legislate and promote policy initiatives, after a consultation period. So what’s in the Green Paper, and why does it matter to RE?

First of all, they’re going to do things which RE could be part of:

• The Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government will set up an innovation Fund – so let’s work together to devise RE-led projects that match the Fund’s criteria
• The Department for Education will strengthen integration expectations in free schools, and work with Ofsted to ensure that inspections focus on British Values – and we all know which subject has the greatest capacity to teach about integration and values, British or otherwise
• The DfE will also support teachers in promoting British Values across the curriculum – so let’s give them a great reason to support RE specifically.

There are several other recommendations, such as strengthening the programme that supports links between government and faith institutions, thus keeping an open door between politicians and minority faith communities; and doing more to promote spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.

The Green Paper identifies twelve DfE priority areas and five DHCLG integration areas. The city that appears on both lists is Bradford. There is great work happening there in very challenging and segregated conditions. It deserves to be spread and known about.

Now we could all go red with anger at this Green Paper and say ‘too little, too late’, ‘why did Gove disparage all this in 2010’, etc etc. We could do that, and maybe some of us do. Or we could decline to comment, on the grounds that RE shouldn’t be chasing social instrumentalist bandwagons. I agree that we shouldn’t allow RE to be defined by any bandwagon; instead we should focus on core knowledge outcomes for all pupils. But that needn’t stop us from using a bandwagon, especially when it rolls up so nicely on time, as this one has. So I’d argue that we should treat this Green Paper as a paper of promise – a tremendous opportunity to put RE at the top of the government’s agenda, for the first time in thirty years or more.

This paper could be the springboard for the Commission on RE’s final recommendations. The interim recommendations came out in late 2017 and can be seen here: http://www.commissiononre.org.uk/religious-education-for-all-commission-interim-report/ And it’s amazing that the RE Commission’s recommendations are such a close fit with the Green Paper. In brief, the RE commission wants:

1. 1. A national entitlement statement for RE
   2. To hold schools to account for the provision and quality of RE
   3. A renewed and expanded role for SACREs

4. A national plan for improving teaching and learning in RE

So here’s a table outlining how the Green Paper’s issues correspond to the solutions offered by the Commission on RE:

Green Paper issues and suggestions
Commission on RE recommendations

Need to make good practice in integration better known about
Hold schools to account and create a national plan for RE

Need to change disparities between regions
National entitlement statement for RE

Need to implement at national and local levels
National entitlement plus renewed and expanded role for SACREs

Stronger expectations on schools
Hold schools to account for the provision and quality of RE

Support teachers on British Values
National plan for improving teaching and learning in RE

From this it seems obvious that we in RE have just been given a brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime pulpit for RE, speaking right into the ear of the government’s priorities.

What are we going to do? We need a coherent, high-level response that shows how much RE can do if it is properly supported. Let’s all – RE Council, NATRE, NASACRE, and others – combine on a unified response.

The consultation closes on 5 June 2018. Don’t let’s go red – let’s go green with promise.

Mark Chater is the Director of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust writing in a personal capacity

Sociologists of religion in the 1960s, such as Steve Bruce or Peter Berger, argued for a secularisation paradigm, by which religion would lose its importance in the public sphere and in the private behaviour and identification of citizens. Evidence from Britain was especially important in constructing this paradigm. Since the 1850s, Britain saw a steady decline in attendance at communion and, since the 1920s, in other rites of passage such as baptism and church marriage. The ban on labour on Sundays or a pledge to abstain from alcohol, both mainstays of Nonconformist culture c.1900, are almost entirely forgotten. Finally, the most striking instance of Christianity’s loss of control over society is the disappearance of taboos surrounding sex before marriage, especially after the 1960s.

The paradigm states that these changes are side effects of intellectual and economic developments since the early modern period. The Reformation, it is argued, was linked to an expansion in literacy and the ability of laypeople to interpret Scriptures for themselves. And the diversity of Protestant interpretations of Scripture meant that uniform belief was now impossible, forcing wider discussions about religious tolerance and the management of diverse theologies after the Civil War. Industrialisation in the nineteenth century meant migration away from the social control of face-to-face village life for the relative anonymity of the town. It also meant the evolution of labour organisations that could provide welfare, without leaving the poor dependent on the provision of churches.

According to the secularisation paradigm, the transformations of the twentieth century, namely the spread of democracy and the welfare state, pushed the functions of the church as a provider of welfare and education to the sidelines of society, while the experience of democratic involvement and trade unionism made social choice, and holding rulers to account, a more common part of everyday political experience. In a political environment where choice was considered a social good, and where people were considered to be qualified to know their own interests, it became much harder to maintain the cultural and religious status quo. As Antony Giddens has put it, the key characteristic of modernity is that behaviour has to be justified and argued for, it cannot be taken for granted. As the possibilities of media and leisure diversified, religion increasingly had to compete, not only with other worldviews, but also with other ways of spending one’s time.

This, then, is the model. But many have found it a poor way of explaining the persistent role of religion in the twentieth century. Grace Davie has argued that modern Europe continues to draw on religion to define time and space, of cities known by parish names and of seasons of the year defined by the celebration of festivals. Religion continues to be present in education in many European countries and plays a political role (perhaps most notably in Germany, where religious organisations can charge additional taxes for adherents). Moreover, new religious movements such as Pentecostalism have adapted very well to a modern urban environment. Its extraordinary growth in Latin America, East Asia and Africa over the last fifty years has been attributed to its egalitarian, democratic and female-friendly leadership structures, its strong welfare organisation and its multi-racial character, all of which seem to be characteristics that are attractive in a globalising and democratising world.

Muslim-majority countries have showed some of the best examples in which the secularisation paradigm appears to have been confounded. The establishment of a theocratic government in Iran, the exaggeration of sectarian difference in Iraq and Syria and the entrenched role of religious political parties in Pakistan all seem to defy the predictions of Bruce and Berger. Indeed, Peter Berger was moved to abandon his earlier faith in the paradigm. He argued that Chicago sociology professors had expected the mullahs of Qom, American evangelicals and Tibetan lamas to become more like them, but it was the sociology professors who were actually the odd ones out.

Others theorists, like José Casanova, have argued that what we have seen in the twentieth century is not a decline in the significance of religion, but a re-definition of religion in response to different definitions of the secular. He argued that the proliferation of different spheres of knowledge (science, economics, the state) has led to specialised forms of moral investigation that traditional forms of reasoning from Scripture have found it hard to engage with.

Steve Bruce, however, has remained firm. For him, the paradigm itself is about the relationship between democracy, industrialisation, education and welfare (on one hand) and religion (on the other). I imagine that he would argue that the persistence of religious influence over politics in Pakistan (for instance) is a function of the failure of the state to produce a welfare state, foster critical education or allow democracy to affect vested interests. If there was an act of over-confidence by the secularisation theorists, it may have been an over-confidence in the spread of social democracy, rather a misconception of how social democracy had affected religion.

In November 2017 the University of Exeter published ‘Big Ideas for Religious Education’. The report is the outcome of a year’s work by twelve leading academics and advisers working with teachers in the South West. It proposes a radical but simplified approach to planning the RE curriculum and to assessment without levels.

In this article Barbara Wintersgill offers a general introduction to Big Ideas for teachers and others interested in curriculum and assessment.

The debate around what we should teach in RE is as lively as ever. In recent years, it has added impetus because of the enthusiasm shown for the ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum and the mantra around teaching ‘fewer things in greater depth’. It all points towards that key question:

How do we decide what knowledge to include in RE?

How do we decide what to include given the vast body of possible stuff to teach? The era of ‘levels of attainment’ (how long ago it now seems) put skills at the heart of the decision about how we define progress. Pupils got better at explaining, describing or evaluating etc. But we gave insufficient attention to the question of how to select and sequence knowledge to make sure the understanding of the subject improved.

The danger now is that the ‘knowledge content’ debate becomes a battle for territory with different interest groups fighting to include the stuff they want teaching. That is no way to run a subject!

Tim Oates in his review of the National Curriculum in 2013 is credited with the mantra of doing fewer things in greater depth. But in RE does that mean fewer religions and beliefs or fewer aspects of religion and belief? The Big Ideas in RE Project highlights an overlooked quote from Oates that students need to secure ‘deep learning in the big ideas in the subject’.

Why are Big Ideas important in RE?

The new and exciting ‘Big Ideas in RE’ Project proposes a set of principles as a way of determining that content.

November 2017 saw the publication of the University of Exeter’s report, ‘Big Ideas for Religious Education’. It is the outcome of a year’s work by twelve leading academics and advisers working with teachers in the South West. It proposes a radical but simplified approach to planning the RE curriculum and to assessment without levels. http://tinyurl.com/bigideasforre

It has its origins in work undertaken in science education and takes it starting point from four fundamental questions:

• What criteria should we use to decide what content is included in RE?
• What criteria should we use to decide how to sequence the content?
• How might the RE curriculum be presented in a more coherent way?
• How might we make RE more engaging for young people growing up in the 21st century?

The Project posits the notion that if we can agree those Big Ideas they will unlock answers to those four questions.

Big Ideas are powerful and can:

• help us make sense of what might otherwise be confusing information and isolated facts
• act as lenses to illuminate what is relevant to RE and hide what is not
• taken together, express the core or central concerns of the subject
• act as criteria to select and prioritise knowledge in the curriculum
• are transferable to events outside the classroom helping students recognise them as important elements of 21st century life
• provide memorable headlines to help us focus on what is important.

So what are these Big Ideas in RE?

The Big Ideas in RE Project proposes 6 Big Ideas which lie at the heart of the subject…….

1. There is an amazing variety of religions, non-religious worldviews and ways of life in the world, each being characterised by continuity and change, and internal consistency and diversity;

2. People use both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication, literal and figurative, to express beliefs, values, experiences and identities;

3. There are many ways in which religious and non-religious worldviews provide guidance on how to be a good person and live a good life;

4. Religions and worldviews are about experience as much as belief, and they can help individuals interpret their experiences;

5. Religious and non-religious worldviews interact with the wider communities and cultures, affecting and affected by politics, artistic and cultural life, social values and traditional rituals, sometimes having considerable power and influence beyond their own adherents;

6. Religious and non-religious worldviews provide coherent overall accounts, ‘grand narratives’, of the nature of reality – life, the universe and everything.

These summarise the heart of what students are studying in RE throughout their schooling. They look deceptively simple but their power lies in their flexibility and coherence. They can be used to plan a coherent curriculum in a wide range of different contexts.

For a more detailed account of the Big Ideas in RE Project and how it can be used to plan the curriculum go to https://www.reonline.org.uk/news/big-ideas-for-religious-education/

There is no doubt that RE in the past was in danger of neglecting the core foundational beliefs of any religion or worldview – I think most people in the world of RE agree on that. Focus on the so-called externals of religion and the rush to explore social and ethical issues to provide ‘relevance’ are well documented. Ofsted remarked on this on more than one occasion. It was one of the consequences of the poor application of phenomenology to the study of worldviews.

So, we needed to pay more attention to core beliefs.

In the case of theistic religions, this inevitably means looking at their theology as part of the content of those faiths. It means examining those core foundational theological concepts; it means examining the way they were constructed and interpreted; it means looking at the way they have changed and evolved in response to wider historical, cultural and social changes; and it means examining the impact that beliefs have on the lives of the believers and in wider culture. It means all these things.

There are some obvious but important checks and balances needed in any discussion of the place of theology in RE:

1.In the words of an RE colleague: ‘it is .. important that students learn that theology is a rather rarefied activity within a religion. In other words, it is not usually the concern of ordinary believers. So teaching theological concepts can give a misleading reflection of how the majority of believers practice their religion.’ For many, possibly most, being religious has little to do with what they believe – it is much more to do with their practice, values, and sense of identity and belonging. These are shaped to some extent by the formal beliefs but many will have little sense of what that might mean.

2. It is important that students learn that religions and worldviews involve a tension between the orthodoxy of the establishment and the heterodoxy and syncretism of the people. Many people’s ‘theology’ is very heterodox: “at variance with an official or orthodox position” and syncretistic: “a union or attempted fusion of different religions, cultures, or philosophies”.

3.It is important that students learn that the term theology only really applies to theistic Abrahamic religions. To assume it has universal application to non-theistic, dharmic and non-religious worldviews is unhelpful. Humanists may have a view about theism as part of their ‘core foundational beliefs’ but they do not have a theology.

4.And, much more problematically, we need to remember that there are those who question the validity of theology as an academic process. As the American science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein said in his 1984 book Job: A Comedy of Justice, “Theology … is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there.” This position is divisive and uncomfortable for RE and probably best parked for the duration!

So – with these important caveats – I think there is widespread agreement that understanding the nature, content, function, history, impact of theology within theistic religions is one important part of any RE provision. It is also clear that a range of disciplines is necessary to study that theology – history, social science, phenomenology, philosophy, textual study etc.

The challenge is to answer the question: Should and can RE incorporate theology as one of its core disciplines as well as part of the core content of its curriculum? When in RE you study the theology of Christianity, are you ‘doing’ theology or are you ‘doing’ something else such as phenomenology or philosophy?

Given the diversity of our teaching force and pupil population our starting point has to be that religions (and beliefs generally) are natural phenomena that deserve to be studied with the same seriousness as all other natural phenomena. Whether they are more than natural phenomena is something we have to leave to one side in terms of our methodology. We study religion and belief as one fascinating aspect of being human. In order to be truly inclusive and reflect the plural nature of our society, RE has to be epistemologically agnostic.

Is it the case that ‘theology’ as an activity only really takes place inside a theistic faith community? Outsiders can examine that activity as an object of study – and should do so respectfully and seriously – but they cannot really participate in that activity itself.

My conclusion, and others may want to offer other ideas, is that theology is best seen as part of the important content of any study of a theistic religion. Whether you define study of that theology as ‘theology’ may in the end be a matter of semantics. But in reality I think the disciplines in play will not be theology as such but a rich combination of history, social science, phenomenology, philosophy, textual study etc.

Alan Brine

Alan is a member of the Commission on Religious Education but is writing here in a personal capacity.

One of the biggest misconceptions about religious education is that it is a subject where opinion is paramount and knowledge only secondary. This assumption permeates the conceptual rationales advanced by some leading religious educationists, the working philosophies of teachers, and the presumptions of students and their parents.

‘I wanted to teach RE because it’s about all the many beliefs there are and it’s about your own opinion’ explained one trainee teacher to me recently.

A history teacher involved in the same conversation, concurred: ‘RE is different from other subjects like history, because there are no facts, only subjective points of view.’

Similar lines of thinking, including those assumed by RE examiners and curriculum designers, have led to the prevailing belief that RE’s foremost role is to foster debate and discussion, not to promote the learning of a body of knowledge.

The relationship between RE and epistemology has rightfully been identified as an academic question of considerable import. For example, Andrew Wright argues that critical realism (put simply, a philosophy that assumes there is one objective reality to be approached through reasoned discourse) makes the best under-labourer for the work done in classrooms by students and teachers. This can be contrasted with the vision of Clive Erricker who advanced the position that as all knowledge is in some sense constructed through the means of one or another power-structures, the subjective experience of the student should not only be the focus of RE pedagogy, but can never be silenced by any overarching meta-narrative, not least those of religions.

Conceiving the purpose of education in general as the learning of facts has been reviled by many. Over-emphasing the importance of knowledge is famously parodied by Charles Dickens’ Gradgrind in Hard Times. Gradgrind, a personification of utilitarianism, sees the purpose of education as teaching facts and the student merely an empty vessel to be filled with them. In classic Dickensian conversion, Gradgrind later changes his mind through a twist of narrative. Of course, as Dickens – a dissenter whose Christian ethics subtly saturate his entire oeuvre – would agree, RE, perhaps more than any other subject, is about the development of the whole person and not just about learning facts.

Yet facts do matter, and religious education cannot take place without learning the necessary ones. Indeed, knowledge plays its part in developing the whole person. For all religions rest on historical facts in addition to well-developed mythologies. A further fact is that there is disagreement as to what the facts are – and these contestations may depend on adversaries’ own positionings within varying traditions of beliefs and practices. While these traditions are deeply contested, they are not merely bunches of opinions and are very unlikely to be entirely personal musings. All assumptions and presumptions are learnt somewhere.

A helpful way of thinking about how to approach religions in the classroom is to clarify the difference between relativism, pluralism and absolutism. The first is the view that positions are in some sense necessarily contingent and never absolute. The second is that there are a variety of positions coexistent. The third, that there are immutable principles which are necessarily true. It seems that the assumptions of some religious educationists are that religious questions are absolutely relative. We are stuck in never-ending disagreements that can never be resolved or lifted above a radical, or sometimes primitive, subjectivism of ‘I like x.’ Or ‘I don’t like x.’ If there are no religious facts, debate always serves to learn about others’ points of view which we can never objectively evaluate. However, on the other hand, pluralism need not be absolute. The fact is there are differences and there are objective reasons as to why. There may also be error.

There is a tradition within the philosophy of education that sees all religious claims as unverifiable and therefore indoctrinatory. Religious knowledge does not have the same epistemic rigour as other kinds of knowledge and therefore, as there are no religious facts, can inappropriately induce individuals into traditions of unjustifiable life-orientation. One problem with this view is that it ignores the salience of historical facts to religious traditions. The resurrection of Christ, for example, is for most Christians, fact, justified on the same kinds of testaments as other claims about past states-of-affairs. Since time travel is only possible through historic texts, we have to make a decision on this event based on its congruence with other inter-linking facts, just as any other bivalent uncertainty.

Of course, making room for realism in RE is not a way to by-pass the absolute principle of religious freedom which has arguably been conflated with these epistemological problems. What one makes of the facts should be protected in some sense. This is threatened philosophically, however, not by the realist position that there are facts, but more so, by the absolutist relativism that there are none. In practice, religious freedom is threatened by bad teaching, not by realism – although the two may coincide.

One of the most dangerous things in RE is uninformed debate. When students are not always capable of greeting each other politely or coming to a decision civilly on mundane matters, it seems odd that they should be invited to discuss matters as problematic as abortion, peace in the Middle East, or the Holocaust, and then reach some kind of informed consensus or disagreement about them.

The Holocaust is one topic in RE where facts are particularly important. And unlike some of the more ancient claims about past events, the Holocaust is still in living memory of some, and thus still raises intense and emotional disputes. Education about the Holocaust, like judgement itself, needs to be guided by knowledge of the facts, as illustrated by a recent debate between Israeli and Polish politicians, and commentators worldwide.

Recently, the Polish government decided to amend the Law on the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and introduced a new type of crime: attributing the holocaust to the Polish Nation or the Polish State publicly. The law was amended due to common use of the term, particularly in the media, of “Polish death camps”, which distorts the historic facts that Auschwitz and other camps, although being located in Poland, were established by Nazi Germany. A diplomatic argument ensued because, although most Israeli politicians consider the use of term “Polish death camps” historically incorrect, many are also concerned about the possible violation of the freedom of speech for those who want to discuss the involvement of Poles in the holocaust.

Here is a classic example of how semantics may shift and attribute blame unjustifiably, and a balanced appraisal of the facts is essential. It is ludicrous to suggest an occupied country is culpable for a reign of terror that murdered its own citizens, both Jewish and otherwise. However, it is also disingenuous to suggest that facts of the past should not be established in an open, free and rigorous process. For this reason, the new law excludes scholarship and academic work, and after an exchange of views on both sides, the current debate is now quiet.

The Holocaust will continue to be an emotive topic. Among its terrible stories, there are many true accounts of heroism and survival. While at an academic conference one August, I met an American with a French name pronounced in a French way. Sitting outside our hotel in a hot forest in Russia, sipping a beer, I asked him why. I was not expecting the answer he gave. With a quiver of emotion in his voice he explained how he was hidden as a child during the occupation of Belgium in a Catholic orphanage. Although Jewish, to make the cover genuine, he practised Catholicism. At the end of the war, he escaped with his family to the US.

After a time, his wife came to us and said that he never talked about this story because it remained so appalling a memory to him. Experience has a brute factual quality to it, particularly when one is suffering. In RE classrooms we often give students the luxury to choose their positions based on their experiences. However, individual stories from the Holocaust comprise many injustices that can be glossed over, lost and manipulated in ever-continuing identity politics. The importance of memory and reputation mean that these controversies will always persist. The religious educator’s lot is to ensure that knowledge also endures. And in this respect, it is only the facts that will suffice.

Older readers may remember a film called ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’. Produced in 1961, it was a classic British science fiction disaster movie starring Leo McKern and Janet Munro. It closed with the world on the brink of disaster or recovery. The final screen image is a news print room at night, with two front page headlines prepared by the printers: ‘world saved’ and ‘world doomed’.

RE saved or RE doomed? It may well depend on choices we in the RE community make in the next few months. We have a choice of two ways to go. Here are two histories of what we did, as told by historians in 2025.

RE Saved

The final Commission report in September 2018 galvanised the RE professional community to a surge of common purpose and organisation, emboldening the Department for Education to enact a national strategy for RE backed up with legislation. The purpose and scope of RE was defined in law for the first time. As a result, by September 2019 headteachers in all publicly funded schools were clear about their obligations to teach RE, and made conscientious efforts to support it. The DfE ensured that Ofsted’s inspections checked for a broad and balanced curriculum, including RE. Faith-based inspections became more transparent, so that the public could be reassured that RE was taught with sufficient breadth and impartiality in all schools.

In the 2022 election, all major parties included a manifesto commitment to accept the RE reforms, and to support initial training and continuing professional development for RE as one statutory subject among others. The new energy and refreshed focus released by the reforms led to a renaissance in the subject. GCSE and A level numbers rose. The DfE and some funders collaborated in sharing the costs of professional development, enabling non-specialists to teach RE well and confidently. By 2024, the supply of qualified RE teachers was boosted by those graduates who had come through the new GCSE. State and charities also collaborated in funding local networks of teachers in resourcing RE, challenging and supporting each other’s practice, and engaging in relevant research.

Following the legislation, SACREs flourished with a new mandate to promote respect for religious and cultural difference in their communities. SACREs found that their credibility was significantly enhanced by the new mandate, and by a new, more inclusive membership structure. Freed from the duty and expense of syllabus-writing, they resourced RE in schools, monitored withdrawals from RE, and engaged constructively with other front-line sectors where diversity issues arose. Their partners included schools, the health service, universities, careers services, police, trade unions, and employers. By 2025, Home Office monitoring of hate speech incidents showed healthy patterns of improved tolerance and respect for diversity among young people.

RE Doomed

The final Commission report was a fudged, compromised document which failed to inspire and unite the RE teaching profession. It was received by RE associations and faith communities by bickering, cavilling and resistance, some of it based on vested interests. In the face of this, the Department for Education lost its appetite for engagement, and considered any national intervention in RE to be too politically risky. The DfE welcomed the report politely but set no timetable for action.

The ensuing vacuum allowed a growing number of Academies to continue ignoring their obligations on RE. Local authorities lost more schools, and suffered further austerity cuts. Such support as they were able to offer SACREs and RE in 2018 disappeared in most places. Recruitment continued to decline, good RE teachers became a scarcity, and this led to further contraction and closure of RE departments in the non-faith school sector. The decline in timetabled teaching and qualified teachers meant that GCSE and A level entries also decreased year on year. The cycle of decline steepened. By 2020 most headteachers of community schools concluded that RE could not be validly taught and that there were no sanctions for ignoring it altogether, or franchising it out to visiting faith groups. There was a smell of decay around RE as a subject, but as the only voices raised in protest were small in number, nothing was done. In the faith school sector, RE remained strong as an expression of faith school ethos. For some faith communities, getting what they wanted in their own schools blinded them to the wider national decline.

Agencies that could have steered things in a different direction failed to do so. Civil servants ignored the negative indicators and denied there was a crisis. RE professional organisations were slow to work together, unwilling to bury their differences and unite behind common messages. They denied legitimacy to new voices from able teachers who could have led the profession out of the wilderness. Change agents were frustrated, and their credibility suffered as a result. Charitable funders, having propped up RE organisations for many years, saw no progress being made, and took their money elsewhere.

The national census of 2021 revealed a country where levels of tolerance, reasoned responses to diversity, and religious literacy were dangerously low. In 2025, a retired politician and an academic, who had authored an urgent call for change ten years previously, issued another pamphlet titled ‘What have we done to RE’. Too late, policy makers woke up to the realisation that the country had lost something of the profoundest value, and lost it by a habit of neglect and avoidance.

Mark Chater is the Director of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust writing in a personal capacity

On describing his conversion to Christianity, C. S. Lewis remarked, ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else’ (Lewis, 1945, p. 21). To paraphrase, for Lewis, not only is Christianity something credible to believe in, but it also provides a coherent and credible framework within which to make sense of everything else.

Theologians working within other religious traditions would mostly concur with this: while no one can have a “God’s eye” view of the world (other than God) – religion provides the most meaningful and satisfactory way to see the universe. Furthermore, in addition to perceiving, religions also provide a way of being in the world. They impact and form the habits, philosophies, theologies, aspirations, ethical positions and education (among other things), of those who identify with them.

Scholars have provided different paradigms to account for the comprehensiveness of religions. Systematic theologies are perhaps the most obvious and long-standing of these, but social scientists in the last century have advanced theories to account for the total and complex impact of religions on society and the person – from ‘religious cosmology’, ‘worldview’, ‘life-world’ or ‘identity’, to Ninian Smart’s various dimensions of religions, for example. These all affirm that for those who adhere strongly to a religion, seeing the world from that position is all encompassing and cogently so.

One kind of object seen through the lens of a given religion, so to speak, are other religions. This presents further complexity for religious educators to address. An educator’s lens will affect what students are encouraged to look for, and how students are encouraged to interpret it. Error may result when our eyes are so focused on the object beyond the lens, the possible effect of the lens itself goes unaccounted. Likewise, our view may be distorted when our vision rests on our lens without looking through it at all. Nevertheless, we have no choice but to look through one lens or another and to have that lens focused somewhere (rather than everywhere).

While it is frequently sought, there is controversy as to whether there is any ‘neutral’ position from which to see religions. There is no lens from nowhere. The religious studies approach that became popular in the 1970s as a supposedly more impartial method than traditional theology has been discredited and exposed as an ideology in its own right. The belief that all religions share the same common fundamental principles represents just one religious lens among a wide spectrum of positions. Many religious believers see other religions as prefigurements, or antecedents that have been subsequently superseded by their own religions, for example. In chronological order, from Judaism, Christianity and to Islam, each successive revelation is believed by the newer religions to have ‘superseded’, ‘fulfilled’ or ‘sealed’ the previous one. The universalism of some forms of religious education can be seen as superimposing a newer narrative of the supposed unity of these traditions that supersedes the exclusivist truth claims of bygone eras of religious fundamentalism.

One alternative to a homogenizing approach that sees all religions as at heart the same, is one that apprehends the religions as a diverse and dynamic set of incommensurable lenses. This does not mean that when we do religious education, we must don new sets of glasses – even if that were possible. Perhaps to recognize why we stick to one view over another is to be as equally well religiously educated as those who claim to have taken a difficult glimpse of the world through another perspective.

Recent research has attempted to follow this general line of inquiry. For a special issue of the Journal of Beliefs and Values, I invited a group of scholars to explore examples of how different religions have seen each other throughout history. The results give counter-examples to some common views of the way religions are often thought to perceive one another. I give some examples. Jews and Christians actually saw the destruction of the second temple in similar ways. In the twelfth century Middle East, records from a Jewish traveler suggest that despite different legal statuses and disastrous events, in some places Jews, Muslims and Christians lived in constructive coexistence. In nineteenth century Germany, Jewish scholars frequently compared themselves with Muslims in the context of Christian Europe. Contemporary Lebanon can be seen as a model of Christian-Muslim relations. In the contemporary USA, some attempts at interreligious dialogue may fail to engage with some minority religions, despite the organizers’ intentions. The examples could continue, but the lesson is the same. The way religions see each other, and the way people see religions, change across time and place. Perceptions are affected by significant events and ways of thinking: war; social and economic factors; and prevailing intellectual trends.

Given this complexity, what do we need to do as religious educators to help students understand the phenomenon of religion? Clearly, we can never know enough about religion in each different context and circumstance, and even if we could, we would never be able to impart all this knowledge to our students. However, while we cannot see everything to be seen, our lenses may be adjusted, and they may also be used in conjunction with a reflector (if I may continue with the metaphor). This means that future observations may be better encountered and considered through informed understanding.

It is by helping students to construct the tools of self-understanding and adopt the practices of reflection that we may progress. Good religious education promotes the habits of mind needed for the task of understanding one’s own position and interpreting other people’s. This involves serious intellectual virtues: suspending judgment; thinking through one’s own views; imagining what it would be like to be different; weighing all the evidence; asking and answering questions; disagreeing respectfully; and, above all: not taking anyone’s word for it. These are just some of the ways of thinking, ways of being, that good teachers and students learn, practise and rehearse in religious education.

One way to become a better teacher or student of religious education, or indeed religious practitioner – as well as to overcome barriers between those of different religions – is to develop the reflexivity to understand the implications and origins of one’s own perceptions. This not only enables those who look through different lenses to understand how to live well together and see each other better. It may also enable the development of more coherent visions of the world itself.

RE teaching aspires to place religions into a historical context. This is important because it prevents students from essentialising: just because a Scripture says x, or members of a tradition have done x, it does not follow that all members of a tradition will do the same. A historical context for the development of religion also encourages adherents of a given tradition to view their own tradition more critically. Notions of right behaviour can be more adaptive and flexible, and more engaged with other traditions, if adherents do not believe in a single truth, written in a Scripture that is never understood anew in changing circumstances.

However, research in the field of the Study of Religions has stressed an additional sense in which cultural context is important. Authors such as J.Z. Smith and W.C. Smith have emphasized that ‘religion’ itself is an unstable category, which has been shaped through political processes and is defined in different ways in different contexts. Concepts of ‘religion’ may be related to one another genealogically, but what they share, according to these theorists, is that they are determined by the assumptions and political expediency of the powerful over the less powerful.

A recent work in this school of the study of religion is Brent Nongbri’s ‘Before Religion’. Nongbri is trained as a classicist, but his work is also informed by his ethnic background: his father is a Khasi, one of the peoples of the uplands of north-eastern India. Nongbri draws on this background to illustrate how ‘religion’ is not a universal category. He describes asking his father the Khasi word for ‘religion’, and discovering that it is identical to the term for ‘custom’. This discovery stimulates his argument that Khasi ‘religion’ is something that is willed into being by translation, and the expectations of Anglophone dictionary writers and observers.

Religion has, of course, been defined in many ways by scholars. Members of the RE community may be familiar with the six-fold definition used by Ninian Smart, who was also famous for introducing the concept of phenomenology into the teaching of RE in the 1970s. Smart argued that religion was characterised by doctrine and philosophy; myth; a tradition of law and ethics; rituals; an emotional connection to the sacred and the presence of distinct hierarchies. Smart stressed that none of these characteristics were necessary for a tradition to be a religion, but that most religions included most of these features.

Nevertheless, the study of religion has been plagued by its difficulty in pinning down its subject matter precisely: it has been accused of becoming a discipline that has failed to find anything to study. But such accusations miss the point: instead of focusing on individual religious traditions (Islam; Christianity; Sikhism etc.), the study of religions has found a new focus in problematizing the term ‘religion’ itself. ‘Religion’, Nongbri or J.Z. Smith would argue, cannot be used as a term of analysis (an etic term) because its definition is too contested to be useful and we cannot be sure that we are comparing like with like. The Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin provocatively suggests that the only honest definition of religion is ‘something that looks like Protestant Christianity’. In other words, it is a term that purports to be neutral, but actually compares quite different traditions to the advantage of one tradition and the disadvantage of the others. The dice are loaded towards the assumptions of the Anglophone cultures that write the dictionaries and scholarship.

On the other hand, the study of religion has re-focussed its efforts around tracking the ways that ‘the powerful’ have used the definition of the word to re-forge the world in their own image. Nongbri’s work in particular has rebelled against the idea that traditions have a true religious belief, which is embedded in Scripture and which, like Protestant Christianity, can be privatised without intruding on the state. He emphasises that the notion of a true core belief (‘Christianity is the religion of love’; ‘Islam is the religion of peace’) is indebted to Romantic-era notions of the ‘true spirit’ of different national cultures. We might find it appealing to imagine ‘good’ versions of Islam and Christianity, with things we dislike as later accretions, this does not do justice to the formation of religious traditions as fluid entities that change and transform as they are passed between generations.

For each era, Nongbri suggests that we can examine how one set of expectations about what religion is has determined the responses of the less powerful. Thus, to give one example, he suggests that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European expectations that religions should have a holy book determined the discovery of Hindu scriptures, which then determined how the caste system was embedded in law in British India. That is not to say that India did not host traditions that we might call religion before this date, but that the imagination of these as a single tradition called Hinduism, rooted in a set of common scriptures, was facilitated by European scholars, administrators and law-makers, together with Brahmin informants. His wider point here is that the comparative category of ‘religion’ is not a neutral term: the category itself acts as a lens through which the expectations of one culture can be used to organize the behavior of another.

Nongbri is not solely making a point about cultural and religious history here. He is also warning students of religion against using ‘religion’ as a comparative category without at least recognizing the uses to which the word has been put. He prompts them to ask whether, on reading any text that uses the term ‘religion’, whether a word like custom or culture might do just as well. He does not advocate abandoning the term entirely, but he asks instead for a more reflective usage: what is gained by describing x as religion, rather than as something else? The use of the term ‘worldview’ in the recent Commission on RE could be seen as a step in the right direction from Nongbri’s point of view. The term has the merit, from this point of view, of not privileging belief in god(s) or of assuming the restriction of ‘religion’ into a separate sphere from ‘politics’.

Before too long, the Christmas vacation will be over and children across the land will return to their classrooms. One of the phrases most overheard in their first interactions after the holidays will inevitably be ‘What did you get for Christmas?’

This question can be difficult for some children. Perhaps you didn’t receive the latest iphone or object of desire. Perhaps your family – like many – didn’t pass the holidays harmoniously. Or, for a small minority, perhaps your family didn’t have Christmas at all.

As a child growing up with a family who did not observe Christmas festivities for religious reasons, my experience of school in the run-up to the holidays, and the return back in January, was always a stark reminder of my own difference. For most of my peers, not celebrating Christmas was outrageous, incredible. For me it was a source of childish pride that later soured, as my difference became the cause of some quite nasty jeering that outlasted the festive season.

In this blog, I consider religious diversity in relation to Christmas and what that means for schools. The RE classroom is probably the place in school where Christmas is most critically appraised. Popular RE textbooks and activities explain the origins of Christmas festivities, which helps students realise that there are many borrowed Christmas traditions. Jesus was not born on Christmas day. Rather, the Roman festival of saturnalia, the winter solstice, German folk religion and Coca-Cola advertisements have all made their contribution to what we think is normal at this time of year, (not to mention Wham! or The Pogues). It is outside the RE classroom – even in the most secular of schools and secular of subjects – that the most unreflective Christmas spirit lingers. In classrooms of every type, there will be festive videos, games, mistletoe, card giving, quizzes and pantomimes. A teacher would be a scrooge in making you work on the last day of term.

Current research shows that Britain is so secular that even the term ‘religious diversity’ should perhaps be replaced with ‘diversity’. The number of people declaring themselves as ‘no-religion’ is increasing rapidly. One useful observation here is the Norwegian religious educator, Geir Skeie’s dichotomy between traditional plurality and modern plurality. The former is religious diversity caused by the migration of those with different religions, the latter the diversity caused by the postmodern condition of being able to choose one’s own worldview from an array of sources: from Che Guevara to gothic rock music; from Star Wars to mindfulness. However, the ‘new normal’ of no religion does not preclude Christmas, and traditional religious plurality does not oppose it either. I have never met a practising adherent of a non-Christian religion who does not appreciate the importance of those of other faiths celebrating their festivals. Not only that, but in the UK many Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish families in some way acknowledge the passing of Christmas, be it with the exchange of gifts or the attendance of parties. Indeed, not celebrating Christmas may be difficult. It is a national holiday after all. This is something my family discovered long ago. Whatever you choose to do or not to do, it is still Christmas and Britain, for a moment, stops. It is a time for family rituals and therefore any action performed during it takes on symbolic meaning, even if that is watching Star Wars or playing Monopoly.

The religious educator could be forgiven for thinking, as often is argued by religionists, that because of the commercial and secular aspects of Christmas, it is no longer a religious festival. However, it is quite clear that while the holiday season may involve all kinds of things considered outside of religion – such as drinking, office parties, shopping, Christmas jumpers, cooking etc. – once the festive elements are taken away; it is not the same. You could cook a turkey any time of the year, but at Christmas choirs of angels do sing, people do attend church services, and people do wish, for a short time, for peace on earth (or at least between loved ones). Christmas therefore becomes a paradigmatic example of the tenacity of religion, and how Christianity permeates much of what we consider to be secular culture. Just because much of it is frivolous does not mean it cannot be religion. Christmas festivities can act as bonding rituals within families and between neighbours, co-workers, and even strangers of all kinds of religious, and non-religious persuasions.

A third kind of religious diversity is that caused by different kinds of Christian Theology. It is within different traditions of Christianity that we may find some of the deepest divisions over the celebration of Christmas. Distinct from the parts of Europe that never went through the reformation, festivals are not really a British thing. Indeed, Christmas, considered as a popish and pagan festivity, was banned in England in the 1640s until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 – along with all kinds of other religiously themed fun and games. Much of what we think is the proper British Christmas originated in the nineteenth century when the Church of England went through a process of re-catholicisation. My own family did not celebrate Christmas due to beliefs about its non-Biblical provenance, something shared by several Protestant denominations. This meant that the whole school culture of Christmas was quite alien to me. It was not until later in life that I personally found Biblical fundamentalism less convincing and the arguments about the symbolic meaning of the liturgical year more persuasive (and more fun).

Christmas provides a great object lesson for religious education. By examining it we can understand more about the religious diversity around us, and the history of Christianity. We can take something seemingly secular, decode its religious past and consider its relevance today. This is surely the gift that RE can give the rest of the school while the other usual frivolities take place. Perhaps one important lesson to be learnt from studying the role of feasts in Christianity, and the religious history of Britain, is that we have fewer public holidays than countries in continental Europe, and much of the world. You could say, therefore, that RE teaches us we should take the opportunity to celebrate and enjoy a rest from normal life while we can. For that is the true purpose of any festival. A well-deserved break is a good thing to get for Christmas – whatever else you may think or believe.