Why should anyone wish to learn about religion? Religion is, in the phrase of the sociologist Linda Woodhead, “a toxic brand”. In the public imagination the word summons up images of violence, patriarchy and irrationalism. The facile confidence of the “New Atheist” movement in the early years of this century was pushing at an open door. Religious studies nevertheless remains a surprisingly popular A-level subject, although this may owe something to its reputation as an easy one. A recent YouGov poll found that the British public thinks that RE is a subject scarcely more important than Latin, which the public, wrongly, does not care about at all. The National Association of Teachers of Religious Education has just launched an appeal for more teachers.
The association is quite right: religious education matters a great deal. At the very least it can function as a kind of ethnography, teaching people about the customs and beliefs of different religious cultures – something that is obviously desirable in a multicultural society. To know that Muslims and Jews won’t eat pork, or that Hindus regard cows as sacred, is really just a part of civics. There is nothing specifically religious about such teaching, even if it is by convention part of religious education. It could just as well be taught under geography or history, subjects profoundly influenced by the beliefs and actions of religious people. The real task of RE is much more ambitious.
The peculiar difficulty of religious education, which distinguishes it from all other subjects, is that it deals with beliefs that are not true in the way that the facts of other subjects can be. The sciences deal in testable facts; pupils can and do rediscover by experiment the truths of physics or of chemistry and biology. In history, economics and even literature, there are methods of inquiry that will converge around the generally accepted picture of the world. But there is no experiment that can determine whether God is love, or whether Muhammad is his prophet. There is no experiment that can determine the truth of a humanist belief in human rights. These are the sort of beliefs that can all appear absurd from a hostile perspective, and where they flourish they are not taught as schoolroom propositions but transmitted in thick cultural bundles of habit and ritual: that is why there are so many middle-aged agnostics who still love to sing the hymns of their childhood. The truth of such propositions is tested by the heart. Their meaning is personal, and grows over the course of a lifetime.
What religious education might do that no other subject can is to help people think about this kind of moral reasoning and imagination. Ethics, and even to some extent philosophy, can’t be taught only in the classroom. A good school teaches ethics – such as the virtues of tolerance and respect – continually in every lesson and outside the classroom too. Pupils learn about them by practising them. To box them away into particular classes – whether these are called ethics, philosophy or RE – diminishes their importance. But there is still a place for reflecting on what a school is doing and for how it understands itself. RE is the study of how values are embedded in culture and how they present themselves in our imagination. For most young people today this comes through a kind of undogmatic humanism. That should certainly be one of the subjects studied in RE. But this needs to be part of a much bigger shake-up. At a time when British identity feels uncertain, RE provides an important tool for understanding ourselves and where we’re going.
