Personal knowledge: Teaching place-based religious ethics for a climate emergency

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyse ways that the modern depersonalisation of knowledge production has contributed to breakdown in climate change education, and by extension, prevented moral and religious education from taking on a more ecological dimension. I draw on analysis by indigenous scholars which focusses on an indigenous re-personalising of science in order to make a case for a form of religious, moral and values education as an explicitly ecological pursuit, which arises from situated personal forms of knowledge. I argue that the work of re-personalising teaching and learning also requires educators to confront problems embedded in the models of ethics, values and belief which underpin our pedagogical approaches, particularly the unexpectedly problematic idea of ‘world religions’ and related binary conceptions of knowledge that have emerged from specific Christian lineages. By reconfiguring pedagogy we can pursue more holistic approaches that can in turn help us to overcome depersonalized (and colonial) forms of knowledge production and connect more intimately with the ecologies that sustain creaturely life.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecology
• indigenous epistemologies
• place-based education
• pluralism

Introduction

I grew up a bit North of Seattle, on the ancestral lands of the Dx^w dəwʔabš. Some of those people remain, but their nation and sovereignty has been battered by genocide. These are Potlatch people whose strong leaders appreciated the production of gratuitous beauty in ways which were sometimes sustained by forms of hierarchy and violence (Wilner & Wolfe, 2013). White settlers, both for religious and economic reasons, sought to suppress potlatch traditions, and often failed to see the forms of ecological management being deployed in spiritual traditions (Cole & Chaikin, 1990). As a child, I played in a cedar forest full of trees so tall and wide I couldn’t wrap my arms around them. Some trees had been partially cleared to make pasture for cattle, producing an uneasy hybrid, part farm, part forest landscape which I roamed freely with my younger brother when we were both small. My environmentalism is implicitly driven by longing and grief for that now extinct forest, but I also acknowledge the privilege that gained me access to it. As a child, we commuted to worship in a Christian church which met a few hundred metres from a motorway where rough sleepers, drug dealers and sex workers carried on their everyday lives. In this community I observed modes of intersubjective acceptance, concern, and care. We did not speak of the sometimes noteworthy forms of difference in this community or in my family, but simply carried on with the business of life. I have witnessed the ways that the navigation of difference can require and produce creativity and grace. Alongside those forms of care, the conservative ideologies of my spiritual community of origin also contained forms of violence which produced trauma and estrangement for much of my peer group. I am an ecological pacifist who accepts the paradoxical reality that the production of beauty and modes of loving care can coexist alongside forms of violence and coercive control. I have seen how forms of conservation can be cruel, holding on to an unnecessary preservation of the status quo against natural and human systems that are desperate to change. I am an immigrant: an invasive species who has received hospitality and hostility from the nations of Canada, Scotland, England and Wales. So, when I speak of the forms of planetary care that I think are important, and my diagnoses of our social pathologies which cause danger and harm, this scholarly platform arises from the text and location of my life.

Given that the kind of introduction I’ve just offered can seem out of place and even a bit odd in a scholarly article, it may be helpful for me to explain my rationale for this shift in genre. Public responses to the climate emergency have been troubled by a lack of engagement, especially given the scale of the problem. Scholarly analyses of what one environmental psychologist refers to as the ‘dragons of inaction’ (Gifford, 2011) have pointed in a number of directions, targeting things like ‘outright denial’ and risk aversion, but also pointing to a lack of place attachment. The intractability of inaction points to more deeply embedded challenges, as I will argue, in how we construe valid forms of knowledge and learning. Public responses to climate change, including those which are developed and refined in the context of teaching and learning, participate in an ontology, just like any other endeavour seeking knowledge. This feature of knowledge production is salient for this Special Issue because, in the case of climate change, the uncritical deployment of particular ontological orientations has led to one of the most spectacular educational failures in the modern age. In seeking to confront these challenges and enable climate action, I’ll argue that we need to re-personalise teaching and learning and that doing so effectively will require us to confront problems embedded in the models of ethics, values and belief which underpin our pedagogical approaches. I’ll go on to argue that the unexpectedly problematic idea of ‘world religions’ and related binary conceptions of knowledge have emerged from specific Christian lineages which need to be confronted so that we can pursue more holistic approaches that can in turn help us to overcome depersonalized (and colonial) forms of knowledge production and connect more intimately with the ecologies that sustain creaturely life.

The story of this failure to connect with the public on the issue goes a bit like this: an environmental scientist measures atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, ocean salinity, measures the melt rate of glaciers, or observes changes in species and ecosystem behaviour driven by rising global temperatures. For this imagined scientist (like many of those I’ve worked alongside), these observations are not merely interesting, they are existentially terrifying. So on the basis of a desire to share knowledge, but also to mitigate a growing sense of climate emergency, they attempt to share this information with a global audience, through an IPCC report, a journal article like this one, a public lecture, or some other scholarly fora with the expectation that the sharing of reliably acquired information should catalyse a change in environmental behaviours by citizens. Instead, aside from a small contingent of equally terrified educational allies, they are met with some combination of suspicion, hostility, or indifference. These reactions interrupt what was an expected transition from knowledge exchange to action, and instead lead to a stalled and endlessly restarting dynamic of information refinement and redeployment which has been repeating across nearly a half century.

Awareness and analysis of this dynamic has grown in recent decades, as other authors in this volume also attest. As Jordan & Jónsson (2024, forthcoming) observe, education around climate change can tend towards ‘teaching climate science and (predominantly individual) behaviour change’ leaving problematic modes of ‘dualistic thinking and human exceptionalism’ relatively untouched (see also Lynch & Mannion, 2021). Much of my scholarly research has focussed on the ways that different forms of knowledge production are sanctioned and allowed in the formulation of climate change policy (C. Ives & Kidwell, 2019; C. D. Ives et al., 2024; Kidwell, 2020, 2024). In particular, I have explored the ways that matters of values, spirituality and religion have been excluded from the ‘great debate’ on climate change. This is not just about implicitly excluded topics and unsanctioned forms of speech (or, indeed silence, as Facer argues in another article in this Special Issue), but also about covert choices about who is allowed to comment on climate change as a social and geophysical phenomenon. This fundamental exclusion in the context of knowledge production has practical implications as well. Though environmental policy is often driven by social conscience and broad-minded aspirations, in practice it often fails to operate in inclusive ways (Ogunbode et al., 2023). The reflections of so-called non-scientists, children, indigenous communities, everyday life experience, and spirituality, have all traditionally been excluded from analysis and policy formulation.

It is important to underline how thoroughly this conviction is worked out in practice: in my research encounters with scientists and policymakers, some have confirmed that they (sometimes explicitly and other times implicitly) work with a secular ‘firewall’ in practice, bracketing out their own personal experience in the context of policy formulation (Habermas, 2008). As a range of post-secular scholars have observed, such a dichotomisation is unhealthy, but even more to the point, presents us with a suite of analysis and policy options which are ill-suited for human participation (C. D. Ives et al., 2024).¹ In what follows, I’ll unpack my analysis of how environmental concern is often de-personalised and I’ll outline a practical programme detailing how education might be broadened and reformed for the sake of fostering more personal forms of learning-for-action in a climate emergency.

Confronting de-personalised environmentalism

One particularly sustained analysis of the way that public conversations about climate change have become depersonalised can be found in indigenous scholarship. In one example, in a book titled Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande (Quechua) analyses the ontology I’ve mentioned above as ‘the deep structures of colonialist consciousness’ (2015, p. 96). It is important to appreciate, as Grande does, that this is a ubiquitous ontological framework in the modern world, where even the usual enemies of Marxist critique and capitalist ideology are hand in hand in agreement (p. 27). This ontological system (which might also be called a system of belief) includes the following elements, according to Grande:

1. belief in progress as change and change as progress

2. belief in the effective separateness of faith and reason (or rationality)

3. belief in the essential quality of the universe and of ‘reality’ as impersonal, secular, material, mechanistic, and relativistic

4. subscription to ontological individualism and

5. belief in human beings as separate from and superior to the rest of nature.

(Grande, 2015, summarised in, p. 99; Liboiron, 2021, p. 16)

It is important to highlight the way that, in Grande’s account, these elements intertwine and reinforce one another which produces a subsequent need to re-inflect pedagogy in multiple and intertwined ways. Other authors in this Special Issue have confronted a number of resonant elements. Jordan and Jónsson raise important questions around the ways that human exceptionalism is a driver of indifference towards and inputs to climate change, and Nichol and Higgins have highlighted the importance of experience and challenged some of the hegemony of rationality and deference to mechanistic understandings of the world. As these authors relate, reparative alternatives have been consolidated by scholars in pedagogical programmes such as post-humanism, place-based education, outdoor learning and wild and slow pedagogy. I see all these programmes as supporting and informing the re-personalisation of education that I am arguing for here, but there are also some more particular critiques and alternatives which need to be considered as well.

We can find an example of a positive programme of environmental science research which seeks to counter prevailing approaches which treat knowledge as objective and depersonalised in Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism. In this book, Liboiron provides an example of scholarship as personal, demonstrating modes of self-disclosure as a form of scholarship (as I have above). There are significant moral implications of this move, as Liboiron suggests: ‘Introductions are important because they show where my knowledge comes from, to whom I am accountable, and how I was built.’ (Liboiron, 2021, p. vi). A further practice, which reinforces this personalising of knowledge comes through Liborion’s adjustment in citation practices, where, each time he introduces an author, he highlights the tribe, nation or social group that they are from:

I take up this method so we, as users of texts, can understand where authors are speaking from, what ground they stand on, whom their obligations are to, what forms of sovereignty are being leveraged, what structures of privilege the settler state affords, and how we are related so that our obligations to one another as speaker and listener, writer and audience, can be specific enough to enact obligations to one another … Introducing yourself is part of ethics and obligation, not punishment. (p. 4)

As Liboiron suggests, there is a dual challenge here. On one hand, we must find ways to acknowledge the inextricably personal and situated nature of knowledge, including those insights we draw from others, even when self-disclosure is excluded in the original forms of dissemination. On the other hand, we also need to create forms of public engagement—including moral education—which can help people to understand and grapple with their own personal experiences of learning about and experiencing ecological crisis and care. In what remains of this article, I’d like to explore some specific ways that we might treat moral and religious education as a context for re-personalising environmentalism. I’ll begin by highlighting some of the specific challenges we need to confront in the way curricula are designed and pedagogy formulated.

Pluralising climate change and confronting worldviews

It can be hard to take on a ‘personal’ approach to climate change because it is so often portrayed in quantitative terms: as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in parts per million; or surface temperatures of the earth which can be seen slowly increasing; or in a series of line charts often termed the ‘great acceleration’ (see Figure 1) where earth system trends (carbon dioxide, methane, tropical forest loss, etc.) are shown as being symmetrical to socio-economic trends (population, GDP, water use, etc.). These conveyances are forcefully quantitative and depersonalised, leaving little opportunity or encouragement for local and storied expressions and experiences of climate change as a phenomenon which cannot merely be aggregated across any scale. Yet, while these charts can be useful in galvanising opinion, they place us in a context where our personal experience and more local or regional ecological effects are irrelevant.

Figure 1. The Great Acceleration, Image: Jeremy H. Kidwell (2024), based on data from Steffen et al. (2015).

On some level it is true that of all the features of our terrestrial home (the earth), the atmosphere is experienced as a global commons. Whether we like it or not, the atmosphere that produces our weather today will be located over a different continent in just a matter of days. But, in ways that are less frequently appreciated, climate can also be intensely personal. The presentation and rhythm of seasonality are unique, even to very small geographic areas. Climate and weather are also highly localised, representing an interaction of specific people with animals and plants living on patches of unique land in particular ways. Inputs towards climate change are also highly unequal, with carbon inputs being variable, depending on the country or region that you live in, and your socio-economic location. The more that we can pluralise the concept of climate (Kidwell, 2022) and the changes which we are experiencing, the more straightforward it becomes to map specific climates and specific ecologies onto specific religio-cultural systems.

Even if we are successful in regionalising and pluralising our account of earth systems towards more of a culture-compatible formulation, there is another challenge which needs to be confronted which is particular to religious studies. Here we find a symmetry between the model I’ve just described, veering towards quantified essentialism, and the ways that education at all levels can also tend to formulate essentialised accounts of religion. Far from approaching religion and worldviews as having a meaningful regional character, we often construe religions as globalised systems, transcending space and time, with rational individuals as observers. In this configuration, learners also implicitly occupy a ‘view from nowhere’. In my analysis, we need to take this same pluralising activity that enables us to appreciate bioregional and socio-economic particularities to our conception of religion and theology, enabling an appreciation of the way that particular expressions of belief systems, some of them irrevocably regional, and others more tacitly so, are themselves always situated in place and time.

This work of pluralising religion is more complex than it might seem at first glance. As Tomoko (2005) argues, the concept of ‘world religions’ in Europe was first formed in the interwar period in the context of a programme of pluralisation. In this analysis, a broad-minded citizen in the first half of the twentieth century was expected to overcome the parochialism of previous ages by developing knowledge of multiple religions (rather than just their own). Seen this way, ‘what makes “world religions” imaginable and palpable as an objective reality is something like a new sensibility of global awareness, a sense of immediacy of the far and wide world’ (p. 40). In order to satisfy this new hunger for enlightenment, scholars who were often caught up in the colonial gaze formulated world religious systems in ways which ignored diversity and disagreement. Brent Nongbri (2013) suggests that the concept of religion itself ‘was born out of a mix of Christian disputes about truth, European colonial exploits, and the formation of nation-states’ (p. 154). Seen in this way, the very concepts of ‘Buddhism’ or ‘Hinduism’ are colonial inventions to homogenise and conceal complex and highly pluralistic societies and make them available for consumption by European audiences (App, 2010, 2012). These colonial legacies should be confronted. The more careful and appropriate response to this challenge, in my view, is not to ignore ‘world religions’ but to explicitly disavow those forms of anthropology which centre objectivity, and promote an alternative embrace of the messy situatedness of cross-cultural encounter and learning. This kind of learning can benefit from forms of historical and ethnographic encounter which allow other cultures to define and delineate religion on their own terms. This is a move further in the direction of lived religion, which has the added benefit of underwriting a reconnection of the personal and regional inflections of religion in the process of definition.

There are several interesting opportunities for educators, particularly in the context of conceptualising a robust place-based education which can reconstitute the study of religion as an ecological discipline. This might involve reflection on cultural ecology models which can adequately account for ways that the generation of culture and language itself arises from local bioregional limits which we can never transcend. Environmental philosophy and religious studies have, in intertwined ways, explored such a connection in the context of deep ecology (cf. Taylor, 2000) or Christian theology (Northcott, 2015), though these connections may be less stable than some have assumed (cf. Davidson, 2007). In a resonant way, some religious systems might be understood as a form of ecological practice where rituals and other types of cultural tradition serve to maintain ecosystems (Rappaport, 1968). Though this kind of reflection is often done at arms-length, this kind of programme need not ignore urban contexts and given the increasing religious diversity in many Euro-American educational contexts, this kind of work need not focus on religion ‘out there’. This kind of programme requires a long-overdue pluralising of Christianity as well, given the intense diversity of historical and contemporary Christian belief and practice.

If we can bring a model of religion to education which sustains it, there are a wide array of opportunities to study the forms of religious practice which can sustain ecological practice and intensify the relationship with landscape alongside those forms which seem to undermine and avoid it. And in turn, we can connect this kind of study with an intensifying understanding of personal situatedness for learners which leads them away from binaries which facilitate human exceptionalism and re-situate them in what Haraway calls ‘naturecultures’ (2003, p. 1). Helpful here is the ontology of dwelling, developed by Tim Ingold, which can help us to contest binaries between self and nature. The benefit of his approach is that it enables us to see our own engagements with worldviews and personal narrative not as self-fashioning, but as a form of relationship. He argues that, ‘apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 42). As Ingold makes clear, this kind of case for re-personalising knowledge also requires some confrontation of hierarchy. Such a challenge to binary hierarchies of knowledge brings me to my next key claim.

Confronting hierarchies of knowledge

In addition to my argument for a certain kind of pluralising (or one might say ‘intensifying’) of the concept of religion, I would suggest that the deployment of personal knowledge as a pedagogical platform requires a radical approach to education which challenges hierarchical notions of ‘scientific’ and ‘cultural’ knowledge which deploy binary conceptions of objective/subjective. It is helpful to re-consider why science education has gone in this highly technical and aggregated direction, focused on quantitative assessment of empirical phenomena. Some historians, such as Peter Harrison, have challenged the dichotomisation of religion and science and pointed to the ways that modern European science and culture (particularly religion) have been intertwined throughout the modern period (Harrison, 2015). Harrison argues that the rise of science began in the late medieval period, and that contemporary science carries forward formulations which are based on the same patterns of hierarchy, regional control, and intellectual purity which were forged in the high medieval Christian tradition. So, in a way, we might say that our knowledge of climate change is formulated in a way that excludes it from the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ because it is carrying forward a certain kind of Christian epistemology. There is a pedagogical opportunity here for teachers to draw on developments in post-secular science history and the anthropological study of science which undermine a neat division between objective and subjective knowledge. Even further, there is an opportunity to take the tools of analysis in religious ethics, whereby we seek to understand the nature of conviction, forms of orthodoxy, and belief to better understand the ways that so-called secular disciplines like environmental science and economics have their own forms of orthodoxy and belief (Bordogna, 2008).

Though I am keen to defend and re-valorise the tools of theology and religious studies for understanding phenomena like climate change, there is a disciplinary mea culpa lurking here which requires confrontation. As above, one can observe a parallel between the ways that scientific knowledge and knowledge about religion exclude inextricably personal categories like emotion and affect. Bearing this in mind, before we can deploy ecological learning in the study of ethics and religion, some foundational work needs to be done to challenge conventional rationalist understandings which take religion to consist of assent to a series of propositions and allow for a wider array of embodied, personal experience.

There is a separate need to confront the frequently deployed pedagogical hierarchy between a teacher who bestows knowledge and a pupil who receives it, not least because teaching for sustainability requires the contestation of other forms of hierarchy. As Sandy Grande observes, if we attempt to maintain “the hierarchy between human beings and nature” this “not only prohibits us from learning from ‘all our relations,’ but also reinscribes the colonialist logic that conscripts ‘nature’ to the service of human society” (Grande, 2015, p. 115). A resonant analysis of this model can be found in Paulo Freire’s (2017) account of the banking model of education in which students are expected to accept and store information given to them as ‘adaptable, manageable beings’, which in turn displaces the formation of a ‘critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world’ (p. 73). I count it as a great missed opportunity that media and educational leadership sought to resist, criticise and even punish student activists who mobilised on ‘Fridays for Future’ and other school boycotts which have been ongoing since 2018 (McGuinness, 2019). It would be interesting to consider whether resistance arose because these hierarchies are more firmly ensconced than we might acknowledge. Can robust and reliable knowledge about climate change come from children, indigenous activists, artists, and people without university degrees? Are there ways that we can bring this knowledge into our classrooms?

As Brace and Geoghegan (2010) suggest, the IPCC and other global bodies have framed ‘atmospheric emissions as a universal and global-scale problem affecting the climate system of the whole planet’, with the result that climate change has been ‘decoupled from the social and political contexts of its material production and cognitive understanding’ (p. 286). Building on earlier work that emphasised the value of ‘local environmental knowledge in the context of everyday life’, they argue for a new emphasis and valorisation of ‘lay knowledges’ (p. 287). This dovetails in helpful ways with Tim Ingold’s suggestion that the best way forward in reconceptualising the human encounter with ‘nature’ is to focus on the encounter with nature as a form of practical enskillment (Ings, 2024).

Though there is an obvious turn to more hybrid conceptions here, resonating with Haraway’s naturecultures, it might not normally be the case that such conceptions be considered a valid object of study and consideration for religious education. I have argued in the previous section for a variety of ways that the intertwining of ecology and religion can be rediscovered. On the basis of that re-engagement, we can also appreciate how this confrontation of the expert/amateur binary also draws us into new ways of conceiving the study and inhabitation of religion which itself can be a context for deepening engagement with and understanding of ecological crisis. Speaking about the religion of others without their explicit voice bifurcates experience from analysis and underlines the need for a more pluralistic account of expertise and the authorisation of ‘good’ knowledge. This challenge to concepts of authorised expertise is a strong undercurrent in indigenous scholarship, highlighted in the ways that Walter criticises the lack of collaborative, or ‘transformative planning’ in favour of tokenistic late-stage consultation with impacted communities (Walter & Andersen, 2013, p. 121). Indigenous environmental scholars also extend this suggestion around consultation to highlight the forms of detached analysis and the attendant lack of listening to non-human creatures which troubles our learning about the natural world.

In 2021, with funding from Culham St Gabriel Trust and The Saltley Trust, Ian Jones and I ran a survey of Religious Education (RE) Teachers which assessed their experiences of teaching on environmental themes in the context of British RE.² An overwhelming proportion of our respondents (78% with an n = 70) disagreed with the statement that ‘the syllabus allows exploration of the relationship between the environment and religion/worldviews’. In contrast, when asked ‘Would you like to explore the environment more fully as a theme in your current RE teaching?’ only 11% responded negatively (29% = maybe, 60% = yes). These findings catalysed our sense that there was an urgent need to analyse barriers and explore concrete humanities pedagogies which could challenge dichotomies of climate change as a scientific, but not moral or cultural subject. The problem of depersonalisation was front and centre as we sought to find a project model which would not just persist dissemination models, but all for the development of more embedded, placed and personal teaching and learning on the subject. Based on these findings, we launched a teacher fellowship programme ‘RE:Connect’ which has been through two cohorts of teachers.³ Fellows on the project have developed pedagogical programmes which encourage pupils to draw on forms of personal storytelling, confront questions of climate justice and student activism, probe the emerging place of affect theory in understanding religion, and find forms of unexpected solidarity across cultural and species lines.

In our rich conversations with these teachers, we have noted how challenging it is in the current atmosphere for educators themselves to be ‘personal’ in the ways that they approach learners, whilst avoiding hierarchy and proselytization. Yet, how can we expect learners to understand forms of ‘personal knowledge’ and positionality around climate change, whilst ourselves occupying a ‘view from nowhere’? As Sandy Grande argues, there are ways of contesting hierarchy which remain personal and this is to shift away from an expectation that learning will result in inclusive forms of harmony (e.g., assimilation) given the ways that ‘the project of inclusion can serve to control and absorb dissent’ (Grande, 2015, p. 217). In contrast, learners can be encouraged to engage in constructive divergence and disagreement, highlighting diversity without seeking to eradicate it. It is a radical suggestion to encourage teachers to abandon the mantle of ‘expert’ but I wonder how fully we can help pupils to possess personal knowledge without forms of teaching which are more transparent regarding a teacher’s positionality and entanglements. The good news for moral education specialists is that there is a vanguard which has been pressing for more diverse, situated, and personal discourses about climate change since the early days of the climate justice movement in the 1970s. With this in mind, I think it is time for RE and moral education to confront this second crisis which is embedded in the ways that we frame and support knowledge production. If we are able to open up our teaching in these ways, it will be an amazing gift to climate science and policy, and hopefully not too late for climate change mitigation.

Conclusion

While there have been major advances in recent decades in climate change education, there have also been some ongoing struggles in particular around public engagement. The increasing awareness that climate change is not just an environmental crisis, but also a social and cultural one and a growing commitment from all sectors to tackle the problem from a wider range of angles poses an exciting opportunity for educators in RE, theological and moral education to connect with pupils around climate change as a moral issue. There are a number of ways that we can accomplish this as other authors in this Special Issue have argued in complementary ways. My particular argument here has been for a re-personalisation of climate change as an issue and a related expansion in the diversity of authorised interpreters of this crisis and the pedagogical formulations we use to engage it. To do this successfully, I’ve argued, will require critical engagement with some of the deep structures of learning and knowledge production and will demand a more robust contestation of knowledge hierarchies and binaries (e.g., subject/object, learner/teacher, human/non-human) including in the ways that we formulate religion and the study of moral reflection.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to express my gratitude to Robbie Nichol for comments on an early draft of this article which I have integrated into revisions. I’m also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback which enabled me to strengthen and clarify my arguments here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremy H. Kidwell

Jeremy H. Kidwell is Associate Professor in Theological Ethics at the University of Birmingham. His research in ethics seeks to engage contemporary moral issues with experimental methodologies drawn from activist studies and everyday religion.

Notes

1. While there is widespread scholarly agreement that modern societies are not in fact evolving to become more secular and irreligious, there is a range of debate on how to characterise this shift. Some like Josephson-Storm (2017) have argued that secularity was a fiction invented and upheld by late-20^th century elites. But other scholars in religious studies, like Beckford (2012), have advocated for caution in embracing post-secular language, lest this shift preserve or even intensify the problems of oversimplification that secularisation theory initiated as well as colonial tendencies to uncritically apply paradigms developed in analysis of European religion to other national contexts (Kong, 2010). For the sake of this article, I’m working with an understanding of postsecularity which Beaumont describes as an ‘indication of diverse religious, humanist and secularist positionalities’ against the assumption ‘of complete and total secularization’ (cited in Kong, 2010, p. 6).

2. Data from this survey is open-access and can be found at https://zenodo.org/records/10673366.

3. Curriculum projects developed by our teachers are freely available for re-use and can be found on the project website at https://reconnect.education/.