MasterClass in Religious Education

Transforming Teaching and Learning

Liam Gearon, Sue Brindley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441154224
• eBook ISBN: 9781441187826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

MasterClass in Religious Education provides a comprehensive exploration of the major themes in religious education research and pedagogy, drawing on international research. The author draws together historical, theological/religious and comparative and international perspectives to explore religious education's role in confronting controversial issues, and the implications this has for teaching, learning and research. This book incorporates discussions of current, post-9/11 debates on religion in the modern world, focusing particularly on the relationship of religion to secular, political contexts. Liam Gearon pays close attention to debates around religion in liberal democratic societies, looking at topics such as citizenship, human rights, and identity.

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Religion, Politics and Education: Modern World, Ancient Disputes

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Chapter Outline

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Introduction

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Religion, politics, education: modern world

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Religion, politics and education: ancient disputes

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Summary

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Introduction

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‘Descending from Judaism, Christianity’s central belief maintains Jesus of Nazareth is the promised messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that his life, death, and resurrection are salvific for the world.’ So reads a source on the history and development of Christianity. ‘Christianity’, it continues, ‘is one of the three monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, along with Islam and Judaism, which traces its spiritual lineage to Abraham of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its sacred texts include the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.’ The text proceeds:

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Catholicism (or Roman Catholicism) is the oldest established western Christian church and the world’s largest single religious body. It is supranational, and recognizes a hierarchical structure with the Pope, or Bishop of Rome, as its head, located at the Vatican. Catholics believe the Pope is the divinely ordered head of the Church from a direct spiritual legacy of Jesus’ apostle Peter . . . The Catholic Church has a comprehensive theological and moral doctrine specified for believers in its catechism, which makes it unique among most forms of Christianity.

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Orthodox Christianity, the text notes, is ‘the oldest established eastern form of Christianity’:

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The Holy Orthodox Church, has a ceremonial head in the Bishop of Constantinople (Istanbul), also known as a Patriarch, but its various regional forms (e.g., Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox) are autocephalous (independent of Constantinople’s authority, and have their own Patriarchs). Orthodox churches are highly nationalist and ethnic. The Orthodox Christian faith shares many theological tenets with the Roman Catholic Church, but diverges on some key premises.

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The same text outlines sixteenth-century Protestant attempts ‘to reform Roman Catholicism’s practices, dogma, and theology’. Protestantism ‘encompasses several forms or denominations which are extremely varied in structure, beliefs, relationship to state, clergy, and governance. Many protestant theologies emphasize the primary role of scripture in their faith, advocating individual interpretation of Christian texts without the mediation of a final religious authority.’

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The source also presents details about other world faiths. Buddhism, it notes, is a ‘religion or philosophy’, ‘inspired by the 5th century B.C. teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, (also known as Gautama Buddha “the enlightened one”)’: ‘Buddhism focuses on the goal of spiritual enlightenment centred on an understanding of Gautama Buddha’s Four Noble Truths on the nature of suffering, and on the Eightfold Path of spiritual and moral practice, to break the cycle of suffering of which we are a part. Buddhism ascribes to a karmic system of rebirth. Several schools and sects of Buddhism exist, differing often on the nature of the Buddha, the extent to which enlightenment can be achieved – for one or for all, and by whom – religious orders or laity.’ Identifying Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism as the two major divisions, of the former it states that ‘the oldest Buddhist school’: ‘Theravada is practiced mostly in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Thailand, with minority representation elsewhere in Asia and the West. Theravadans follow the Pali Canon of Buddha’s teachings, and believe that one may escape the cycle of rebirth, worldly attachment, and suffering for oneself; this process may take one or several lifetimes. Within Mahayana Buddhism, it identifies “subsets” of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and forms of Mahayana Buddhism as ‘common in East Asia and Tibet, and parts of the West’: ‘Mahayanas [sic] have additional scriptures beyond the Pali Canon and believe the Buddha is eternal and still teaching. Unlike Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana schools maintain the Buddha-nature is present in all beings and all will ultimately achieve enlightenment.’

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Other listed traditions include Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism. Information provided includes a worldwide list of countries with percentage break-ups of religious populations by nation-state. In the present-day educational context which sets high store on ‘religiously literacy’ – including Harvard’s School of Divinity, see Moore (2012) – the above outline of religious traditions might be regarded as a good starting point in countering religious illiteracy.

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The source which mentions all the above is the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, 2012a). We can see that there is significant political as well as educational currency in religious literacy. Why though is the CIA interested in religion? The CIA, for obvious reasons, has a particular post-9/11 interest in political forms of Islam. Since 2004, this has been focused on through its ‘Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program (PISAP)’. This is in recognition of the fact ‘that forces that have not traditionally been studied, in a comprehensive manner, by the Intelligence Community needed to be examined as they affect the national security interests of the United States’ (CIA, 2012b). The CIA is careful to point out that the ‘effort does not focus on Islam as a religion or on the worldwide Muslim community; rather, it examines those movements and organizations that use religion for political purposes and use religious ideology to attempt to change the existing political, social, or economic order’. Its remit ‘relies on regional and functional expertise to promote, consolidate, and integrate multidisciplinary analysis on worldwide developments of interest to the US policy community’ (CIA, 2012; and for the reinvention of American–Muslim relations, see Nakhleh, 2008). The information provided across traditions shows, however, that religion per se is of geopolitical and security interest, which I have defined elsewhere and with other examples, as the ‘securitization of religion in education’ (Gearon, 2012; also Gearon, 2013a; 2013b). This chapter elaborates further on how the political interest manifest in religion has impacted on education. The question to consider throughout is, how far or to what extent should religious education be influenced by political aims? And how, or by what criteria, would we be able to judge the educational value of such political impact?

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Religion, politics, education: modern world

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The eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe and America marked a fulcrum point in the history of ideas in which reason and empiricism gained the intellectual foreground over theology and revelation. In the shortest of his works, it was the philosopher Immanuel Kant who provided pithy expression of the fundamentals of this comprehensively radical idea, in Was ist Äufklarung? – What Is Enlightenment?: ‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!” – that is the motto of enlightenment’ (Kant, 1784: 1). Without explicitly referring to the Bible, it is the Bible’s revelation and the authority which this bestowed upon the Christian churches – fractured in their authority since the sixteenth-century Reformation – which is the target of Kant’s statement when he declares: ‘If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay – others will easily undertake the irksome work for me’ (Kant, 1784: 1).

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The autonomy of reason from religious authority would characterize modernity (Bird, 2006). And in Kant’s sense, modernity is therefore ‘secular’. In this context, the potency of secular rationality, science and the technology that emerged in its wake makes discussion of Eisenstadt’s (2000) ‘multiple modernities’, touched on above, a mere nuance of a secular-driven modernity. Rationalism in philosophy and technology in science would define social and political life and, as a consequence, the educational systems which would maintain the outlook and enterprise of modernity – in other words, the world in which we now live.

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These Enlightenment hopes would take different forms and have different impacts, some more immediate and dramatic than others, along what Himmelfarb (2005) calls the ‘roads to modernity’. In all cases, the rational autonomy of the individual in the matter of intellect was paramount. Along with scientific and related developments, the great impact of this was political, not only on church but on monarchy as well: Enlightenment would instigate in some cases a gradual and in others wholesale and immediate impact on the authority of ‘throne’ and ‘altar’ (e.g. Rahe, 2008).

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Kant’s excursus on Enlightenment was written in the aftermath of the American Revolution and just prior to the French Revolution. In the short term, the French Revolution would fail, where the American would seemingly succeed. In the 1830s, the young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America would cross the Atlantic to try to find out why the French Revolution failed. Tocqueville remains of contemporary as well as historical significance: not only for insights into early American democracy, of its separations of religion and state, but also for insights into how religion remained important, and how absence from public education did not hamper religion.

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However, as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn states in The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, it was the events of 1789 in France which would ultimately have greater long-term historical effects: ‘The French Revolution is a landmark in all countries’ (Hobsbawn, 1962: 75). In this, he details the violent overthrow of colonial power in nineteenth-century Latin America. However, as he would elaborate in subsequent works – The Age of Capital: 1848–1875; The Age of Empire: 1875–1914; and The Age of Extremes: 1914–1991 (Hobsbawn, 1988, 1989, 1995) – the eighteenth-century French Revolution would provide a blueprint for revolution in subsequent centuries, including Communism and Nazism in the twentieth.

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When religion is so easily associated with extremism, Hobsbawn’s Age of Extremes is a reminder that for much of modernity, political theory has been concerned not with religious but political extremes. The founding of the United Nations (UN) at the end of the Second World War is a case in point. The notion then that religion could exert any meaningful political threat would have been laughable. Indeed, it was. In 1935 the French foreign minister sought Soviet assistance as Hitler’s power grew, informing Stalin that the support of the Pope would be essential. Stalin is reported to have joked: ‘The Pope? How many divisions has he got?’

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To the UN the Holocaust was gave stark demonstration of the susceptibility of cultural, ethnic or religious difference confronted with dictatorial governance. The UN thus emphasized universal values over particularities of difference. In the light of such events, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) was an attempt to prevent future generations from being subjected to ‘the barbarous acts’ of totalitarianism. To do so, the UDHR emphasized what was shared by diverse cultures rather than what divided them, what was ‘universal’. Education was seen as contributing to legal and political frameworks from the UN’s inception, especially through the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Preamble to the UDHR stresses ‘teaching and learning’ as key to the promotion of rights and freedoms after the eighteenth-century model.

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The Cold War was not, however, the ideal political milieu to engender such ideals. The Soviets and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) may have shared scientific and technological goals – the arms and space race holding the prestige – but political difference still shaped respective education systems (e.g. Bronfenbrenner, 1972; Kirkpatrick, 2002). Although ‘the forty-five years from the dropping of the atom bombs to the end of the Soviet Union do not form a single homogenous period in world history’ (Hobsbawn, 1994: 225), with the Cold War, education lessened as a UN priority and religion surfaced little in large-scale geopolitics.

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Though ideas of ‘progress’ differed, there seemed to be a shared sociological analysis that modernity also meant secularization, that religion would become increasingly marginalized not only in public life, restricted to a private sphere, certainly in politics, but also in intellectual life across academic disciplines (e.g. Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Bruce, 2002, 2003; Fenn, 1978; Martin, 1978; Wilson, 1966). Yet even prior to 9/11 at least one leading theorist of secularization was renouncing his formerly held sociological faith (Berger, 1999; also Berger et al., 2008). As Casanova’s (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World would demonstrate from Cold War case studies (especially from Latin America and Eastern Europe), secularization theory left unexplained the persistent political impact of religion on global politics. No sympathizer with relig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Context, Aims and Limitations
• 1 Religion, Politics and Education: Modern World, Ancient Disputes
• 2 Religion in Education: Contemporary UK, European and US Research Perspectives
• 3 Religious Education and the Religious Life: Theology and Faith Schools
• 4 Religious Education and Secularity: Issues of Cohesion, Diversity, Pluralism
• 5 Pedagogies of Religious Education: Teaching, Learning and Assessment
• 6 Religion across the Curriculum: Arts, Humanities and Sciences
• Conclusion: Context, Aims and Limitations Revisited
• References
• Index