(Published in Report: the magazine of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, January 2006, pp.12-14)

The meaning of religious education: answers for a troubled world

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Michael Hand

Institute of Education, University of London

It is now widely accepted that schools have a responsibility to nurture in young people a range of attitudes, values and virtues conducive to creating and sustaining a harmonious multicultural society. It is also widely held that Religious Education (RE) is an area of the school curriculum with a particular contribution to make to the achievement of this aim. But what exactly is this contribution? What is the connection between the study of religion and the acquisition of values appropriate to a multicultural society? To what extent and in what respect is it fair to place responsibility for social stability and cohesion on the shoulders of RE teachers?

I think the first thing to say is that any special role RE has to play in advancing the cause of multicultural harmony will be a rather modest one. Multicultural societies are built on the core political virtues of tolerance, respect, justice and civic friendship, and the central task of multicultural education is to cultivate these virtues in young people. To this enterprise RE teachers have no distinctive contribution to make. Responsibility for modelling, upholding and promoting these virtues lies with all teachers, regardless of subject specialism; and responsibility for explicitly discussing and defending them in the classroom lies, properly and primarily, with teachers of Citizenship and PSHE.

But while cultivating the core political virtues is the central task of multicultural education, it is not the only task. There are a number of other, more specific values and attitudes that are conducive to harmonious social relations between members of different cultural groups. Among these, I suggest, is an attitude we might rather cumbersomely describe as positive regard for religious traditions other than one’s own. This attitude goes beyond the basic political commitment to respecting persons as ends-in-themselves and recognising their right to believe what they choose on matters of religion. It involves being sympathetic or well-disposed to at least the major varieties of religious belief and the traditions of thought and practice from which they have emerged. Such positive regard for religious traditions other than one’s own, while not a necessary condition of civic friendship across religious divides, works strongly in its favour. My contention is that RE teachers can and should cultivate this attitude in pupils, and that herein lies the modest but distinctive contribution they can make to multicultural education. 

In a moment I shall explain why I think this is a defensible aim of RE. Before doing so, however, I should like to draw attention to two dangers attendant on embracing it. The first danger is that of giving undue prominence to the aim. Cultivating in pupils positive regard for religious traditions is, at best, a secondary aim of RE. It is crucial that we do not allow it to eclipse or obscure the primary aim of subjecting religious beliefs and ideas to careful and critical scrutiny. The basic reason for teaching RE, and the justification for its status as a compulsory curriculum subject, is that children have a right to be exposed to religious truth-claims and equipped with the wherewithal to evaluate them. It would be disastrous for the integrity and credibility of RE as a serious domain of theoretical inquiry if the aim of fostering positive regard were to overshadow this primary aim.

The second danger (and one to which many RE teachers and textbooks appear already to have succumbed) is that the attempt to cultivate positive regard will lead to sanitised portrayals of religious traditions. There is a clear temptation, if one’s purpose is to nurture sympathy, to concentrate on the more benign and congenial aspects of religions and to ignore or underplay the degree to which they are implicated in histories of division, conflict, violence and oppression. One looks in vain through school textbooks for discussion of the overt anti-Semitism in the New Testament, or the social exclusion of the untouchables under the Hindu caste system, or the issuing of fatwas promoting violence against individuals or nations by Islamic clerics. Such sanitisation of religious traditions is educationally indefensible. If we are serious about equipping our children to make rational, well-informed judgments on religious matters, we obviously have a responsibility to portray religions as they actually are, warts and all.

Provided that care is taken to avoid these two dangers, however, I think a case can be made for adopting as an aim of RE the cultivation of positive regard for religious traditions other than one’s own. Put briefly, the case is this: the major world religions address questions of supreme importance to human beings, and they address them in a serious and sustained way. For this reason they are deserving of our attention and respect. Upon engagement with these rich traditions of existential and metaphysical reflection, a reasonable person may conclude that most or all of them have been unsuccessful in their quest for the truth; but she cannot reasonably dismiss them as worthless or absurd, or deny the urgency and complexity of the questions they grapple with. (I am aware, of course, that many educated people in our society make precisely these dismissals and denials; my claim is that they are being unreasonable in doing so.)

Let us work through the argument a little more slowly. I am suggesting that pupils can and should be taught to respect the major world religions on the grounds that these religions are worthy of respect. They are worthy of respect because they address important questions and because they address them seriously. Both of these claims require some elaboration.

The questions at the heart of religion are, most obviously and basically, questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Part of the reason for the importance of these questions is their practical relevance. How a person answers these questions has far-reaching implications for the values by which she lives, for her conception of human flourishing and for the moral authorities she is prepared to recognise. It is a fundamental determinant of her personal identity, of her picture of the world and the shape of her inner life. The other part of the reason for regarding these questions as important is that they are genuinely open. Arguments for the existence of God have been subjected to powerful and in some cases decisive criticism over the last few centuries; but the intuition that the universe stands in need of a more ultimate kind of explanation than science can provide, the perception of design in the natural world, and the religious and mystical experiences reported by ordinary people around the globe, continue to provide theists with rationally credible grounds for their position. And while the project of reducing minds to brains has been vigorously pursued by neuroscientists and philosophers alike in recent years, irreducible logical differences between assertions about mental states and assertions about the material world continue to provide a rational foothold for the belief that minds and bodies are distinct entities, and for the idea that the former might survive the demise of the latter. To recognise that these fundamental questions are both urgently practical and as yet unanswered is necessarily to see them as important.

The second claim is that religious traditions represent serious and sustained attempts to find answers to such questions. Resistance to this claim will come from those who see religions as bastions of dogmatism and obscurantism, more concerned with defending the boundaries of orthodoxy than promoting the pursuit of truth. Certainly I should not wish to deny that religious institutions have been and continue to be susceptible to these vices. But the fact remains that the religious traditions of the world represent repositories of philosophical analysis, theological speculation, textual interpretation and existential soul-searching of extraordinary ambition, sophistication, creativity and diversity. Religious traditions are (mercifully) bigger and stronger than the ecclesiastical authorities that try to police them. What nourishes and sustains them is not obedience and orthodoxy, but a recognition that fundamental questions about the human condition need to be faced and a conviction that progress has been made, that there is a legacy worth building on and a literature worth revisiting in the quest for fuller and more adequate answers.

The major world religions, then, are worthy of our respect, whether or not we find ourselves in agreement with them. And for this reason it is justifiable to cultivate in pupils an attitude of positive regard for religious traditions other than their own. There is no contradiction between rejecting outright the teachings of a religion and recognising that those teachings have emerged from a long tradition of deep and sincere reflection on pressing and complex matters. The cultivation of positive regard for religious traditions is not the primary aim of RE, nor is it without attendant dangers; but it is an aim RE teachers can justifiably embrace and by means of which they can make a distinctive and important contribution to multicultural education.