By Professor Michael Hand and Dr Reza Gholami
School of Education, University of Birmingham
The Commission on Religious Education report has called for an overhaul to Religious Education (RE) in schools and has recommended that the subject should be called ‘religion and worldviews’, to reflect the diversity of today’s world and to incorporate worldviews such as humanism, secularism, atheism, and agnosticism. Professor Michael Hand and Dr Reza Gholami share their views on the report’s recommendations.
Why ‘Religion and Worldviews’ is a non-starter by Professor Michael Hand
The most eye-catching and headline-grabbing recommendation of the Commission on Religious Education is that the school subject currently known as ‘Religious Education’ should be renamed ‘Religion and Worldviews’. That’s a deeply unhelpful suggestion and the government should have no truck with it.
This is a shame, as other recommendations in the Commission’s recently published Final Report are sensible and welcome. It’s high time we did away with locally agreed syllabuses drawn up by faith community representatives and replaced them with a national syllabus created by education professionals. And the right of parents to withdraw their children from Religious Education is certainly in need of review.
But the Commission itself puts the spotlight on its most troubling proposal. The section of the report headed ‘vision and rationale’ focuses entirely on ‘the importance of studying worldviews’. Impressed by the thought that ‘non-religious worldviews have become increasingly salient in Britain and Western Europe’, the Commission rejects the idea that the only philosophies of life worth studying are religious ones. Religious Education must be reconceptualised as ‘the explicit, rigorous academic study of a wide range of religious and non-religious worldviews’ – and the name of the subject amended accordingly.
What are the non-religious worldviews whose salience in Britain strikes the Commission with such force? Three are named in the report: ‘Humanism’, ‘Secularism’ and ‘Atheism’. The first and most obvious objection to the Commission’s proposal is that at least two of these are patently not worldviews at all (a fact that cannot be disguised by eccentric capitalisation). Secularism is the view that political institutions should be independent of religious ones and neutral with respect to citizens’ religious beliefs; atheism the view that there is no God. Neither has anything like the scope and ambition of a worldview.
A worldview is, roughly, a theory of the meaning of life, an account of the significance, origin, and purpose of human existence. In the Commission’s own words, it is ‘a philosophy of life’ or ‘a person’s way of understanding, experiencing and responding to the world’. The word gained currency in the English language following its adoption by 19th century Protestant theologians like James Orr, who took worldviews to be ‘general theories of the universe, explanatory of what it is, how it has come to be what it is, and whither it tends’.
The major world religions certainly furnish their adherents with worldviews. But it’s hard to identify a single non-religious institution that purports to answer for its members ‘these well-worn questions of the why, whence and whither’. The Commission’s insistence that ‘everyone has a worldview’ looks very much like the imposition on non-believers of a category developed with believers in mind.
There is another objection too. Any remotely adequate programme of religious studies already includes secularism and atheism. That’s because secularism and atheism, far from being non-religious worldviews, are in fact views about religion. One is a view about proper constraints on the power of religious institutions and fair treatment of religious citizens; the other a view about the epistemic warrant for religious belief. Teachers of Religious Education are already obliged – and the good ones embrace the obligation with enthusiasm – to teach children about these familiar positions in the politics of religion and religious epistemology. There’s no need to change the name of the subject to get them on the curriculum.
The Need for a Critical Secular Studies by Dr Reza Gholami
The Commission on Religious Education (CORE) report ‘Religion and Worldviews: a National Plan for RE’ takes a step in the right direction by recognising the complexities that are involved in teaching and learning issues of secularity and religion. However, without outlining a plan for a critical study of secularism, the report misses an opportunity to redress an important imbalance.
The problem with focussing on secularity as a worldview, as proposed in the report, is the failure to appreciate how secularism has socially, politically, economically, and culturally reshaped the world over the last two hundred or so years. Its role in the creation of and its relationship with ‘religion’ have both been key features of that history and continue to be so.
The same is to some extent true of religions – they, too, comprise ideological-practical and socio-political dimensions that transform the world; but they have been under critical scrutiny for a long time, whereas the secular has not.
The secularist project spearheaded by English freethinker George Jacob Holyoake in the mid-nineteenth century (the organisation of society by reference to ‘Reason’ rather than God) had, by the end of that century, become entangled with the wider currents of modernity in line with the Enlightenment and industrialisation. This meant that ‘secular’ became associated with ideas of progress, freedom and rationality, defined in opposition to ‘religion’, which was seen as backward and dangerous.
Although this definition of religion arose from secularism’s relationship with Christianity, it became the blueprint for how diverse belief systems and practices around the world were approached by European colonial powers and those they inspired. Religions everywhere were seen as potential barriers to modernity’s ‘civilising progress’.
In countries such as Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and India, the process of secularisation, or its prospect, gave rise to increasingly hard-line religious positions, in some cases planting the seeds of what are today referred to as ‘Islamist’ movements (see for example Ivermee 2016). Interestingly, where a concept for religion was not readily available, it was invented. The Chinese word for religion zongjiao was created in the nineteenth century to bring together disparate beliefs and practices under one category and create socio-political compatibility with the West. Thus, the secular has played a decisive role in the formation of the very concept of religion and in our contemporary understanding of it.
Today, these processes are at play in key areas of policy, including in education, which has now become formally drawn into the counter-extremism agenda. In my own work, I have been concerned with the way religions are represented in the ‘Prevent duty’. Aside from the fact that Muslims (or those perceived to be so) are disproportionally targeted by the policy, the language used from the outset has routinely problematised not just ISIS and Al-Qaida but ‘Islam’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Muslim communities’, ‘the Muslim world’. At the same time, it hides the distinctly Christian identities adopted by many members of far-right and white-supremacist groups. What we have here, then, is an example of secular power: the ability to define, problematize and/or conceal particular religious traditions, while ensuring that the secular remains unquestioned.
CORE’s report is worryingly silent on these issues, and with this, I fear that it will fail to achieve its otherwise admirable goal of a more rigorous and relevant curriculum. What is needed – whether in the RE curriculum or as a separate subject – is a ‘critical secular studies’ (Gholami 2018) that enables pupils to adequately engage with the social and political histories, and the current dynamics, of religions and secularisms.
- References: Gholami, R. (2018) “Cosmopolitanism as Transformative Experience: Towards a New Social Ethic” in Panjwani, F., Revell, L., Gholami, R. & Diboll, M. (Eds.) Education and Extremisms: Re-Thinking Liberal Pedagogies in the Contemporary World. Routledge.
- Ivermee, R. (2016) Secularism, Islam And Education in India, 1830–1910. London and New York: Routledge