Who’s Afraid of Secularisation? Reframing the Debate Between Gearon and Jackson

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the debate between Liam Gearon and Robert Jackson concerning the politicisation of religious education. The debate concerns the extent to which secularisation frames religious education by inculcating politically motivated commitments to tolerance, respect and human rights. Gearon is critical of a supposed ‘counter-secularisation’ narrative that, he argues, underpins the REDCo project (Religion in Education. A Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict in Transforming Societies of European Countries), suggesting that the politicising assumptions behind REDCo in fact extend rather than counter secularisation. Although Jackson’s rejoinder to Gearon is robust and largely accurate, I suggest that it misses the basic challenge that religious education serves political ends. I argue that both Gearon and Jackson are enframed at a more fundamental level by a particular view of religion. The problem of pluralism is not, as Gearon supposes, a consequence of the secular framing of religion in terms of tolerance and respect, but predicated on a propositional view of religion that places competing truth claims in opposition. Nothing less than a transformed view of religion itself is the presupposition and the aim of religious education.

Keywords:

• religious education
• politicisation
• secularisation
• performative
• post-secular
• pluralism

9. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The insider/outsider problem has particular provenance within religious studies and anthropology. Space does not permit me to consider the question in more detail but I must note that Gearon’s references to debates around whether an outsider can understand a religious worldview seem predicated on an unhelpful dichotomy between those who are inside or outside that itself derives from a secularised conception of religious identity (Taylor, 2007). In a certain sense, we are all outsiders, insiders and transgressors, but the comfortable fiction of those within and those left out persists.

2 The literature addressing the history and significance of religious education as a curriculum subject in the British context is vast. Freathy and Parker provide a comprehensive and recent account that addresses many of the issues raised in this article, particularly the influences of secularism and humanism on the formation of religious education in Britain in an increasingly liberal and democratic society (Freathy and Parker, 2013).

3 For an overview of the REDCo project, see https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ces/research/wreru/research/completed/redco/

4 Jackson presents his own explanation: ‘Religious education, according to Gearon, by its very nature involves some form of initiation into “the religious life”; the various examples he gives relate to initiation into the Christian life’ (Jackson, 2015, p. 352).

5 The influence of secularism on religion in schools has been subject to critical discussion from authors such as Terence Copley (2005), Trevor Cooling (2010) and Marius Felderhof (2012) but these discussions tend not to unpick the framing of religion itself, which I am attempting to begin here.

6 A good example is to be found in the Irish Republic where I recently discussed the question of post-secularism in relation to education. The initial response from the audience was to point out that since 93% of schools in the Republic are controlled by the Catholic Church, talk of the ‘post-secular’ was premature without first establishing the secular.

7 Arthur shows how France’s laïceté is not as thoroughgoing across educational institutions as one might imagine: ‘there are nearly 9000 Catholic schools in France, many enjoying government subsidy to educate 2 million children. One in three French children, at some stage in their school career, is admitted as students to Catholic schools. Indeed, the church controls 95% of all private schools in France and is prepared to compromise with the state in order to ensure its continued existence as a provider of Catholic education (Judge 2002). A number of public schools have Catholic chaplains and religious education can be offered on a voluntary basis in some public schools (the Loi Debré of 1959)’ (Arthur et al., 2010, p. 16).

8 Many political philosophers regard the post-secular as reflecting a general scepticism towards Western neocolonial tendencies, inviting a reassessment of the founding myths and assumptions of the Western-led international order of the present geopolitical economy (Christoyannopolous, 2014).

9 It should be noted that Jackson is careful to delineate the particular scope of his rejoinder. ‘The main purpose of the present article is not to deny that there are issues about the nature or aims of religious education – in relation to social, political and security concerns, among others – but to point out Gearon’s misrepresentation of both REDCo and the Toledo Guiding Principles’ (Jackson, 2015, p. 346).

10 As Wendy Brown puts it ‘The conceit of religion as a matter of individual choice … is already a distinct (and distinctly Protestant) way of conceiving religion, one that is woefully inapt for Islam and, I might add, Judaism, which is why neither comports easily with the privatised individual religious subject presumed by the formulations of religion freedom and tolerance governing Euro-Atlantic modernity’ (Brown, 2013, p. 17).