Religion as cuckoo or crucible: beliefs and believing as vital for citizenship and citizenship education

Abstract

The importance of motivational beliefs and, more specifically, religion, is identified as central for both citizenship and citizenship education. Whether they take an expressly religious form, or appear in a purportedly more open form, such as faith or world view, beliefs are at the core of human being. The tendency to speak more of shared values than beliefs in the context of educating citizens is open to question – values are not necessarily any more universally agreed, since they too are affected by beliefs. Moreover, the presumption of secularisation, that religious believing is fast disappearing, is itself now exposed as strangely dated. Beliefs, often explicitly religious beliefs, are fundamental in national constitutions. Thus, religion may inspire a critique of a nation's behaviour; religion will also need to be subject to critique. How to build an opportunity for understanding and critiquing beliefs into any public educational system is a major challenge. The provision for Religious Education (RE) in England is taken as an example of this challenge being directly addressed as a necessary complement to any separate policy for character education, citizenship education and/or moral education in whatever form they exist. RE is able to home in on the religious plurality which figures in national and international life. Understanding of the insights and contentions of religions in all their plurality is a source of illumination for citizens wherever they are in the world

Notes

1. This can be illustrated from anecdotal reflections as well as research studies. For instance, according to a Scottish Chief Constable: ‘I joined Sussex Police at the age of 18 and so I probably had what some might consider as rather naive motives for joining. Like many colleagues I wanted a career that offered variety, excitement and a meaningful role in making a positive difference to the lives of others’. Edinburgh Evening News, 25 February 2006. Similarly, from Ottawa a Police Sector Council study of 1600 young people aged 16–30 reveals that all but 6% saw public sector policing as an opportunity to do meaningful work. For the third who saw it as a serious job option, the most frequently cited reasons were: ‘making one's community safer’, ‘helping victims of crime’ and ‘being of service to the public’ (Ipsos‐Reid, 2005). However, this is not to deny that motives are usually mixed, or that there will not be variations from one country to another.

2. Extensive research, first begun in the 1960s, has demonstrated the power of ‘belief in a just world’ to influence how individuals interpret events in daily life, a belief maintained in spite of appearances and which enables sense to be made of otherwise distressing facts of life (Lerner, 1980; Montada & Lerner, 1998).

3. To the familiar Freudian and Marxist confidence that religion is being outgrown may be added that conveyed in the position of Steve Bruce (2002).

4. For a descriptive analysis of the constitutional context in 44 Muslim countries, see Stahnke & Blit (2005).

5. ‘Soviet citizens used to stand in endless lines to venerate Vladimir Lenin's embalmed remains on Red Square, Moscow. Now Orthodox believers are standing in round‐the‐clock lines to venerate saints' relics. In the latest example of such religious fervour, in over 40 days nearly 2.5 million believers across Russia, Ukraine and Belarus venerated what Orthodox Christians believe to be St John the Baptist's hand, after the relic's return to Montenegro, its home since 1941.’ Report from Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate in Ecumencial News International. ENI‐06‐0607, 31 July, 2006.

6. In Western Europe, Scientology has been subject to extensive legal proscription on this basis, most especially in France (Vivien, 2001; Pallison, 2002) and Germany (Moseley, 1997). In China, the proscriptions extend to forms of Buddhism, as well as less well known groups like the Falun Gong; for a comprehensive overview, see United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2005).

7. Within Christendom, since the time of Constantine in the fourth century CE, emperors and monarchs were regarded as deriving their authority from God and this was transmitted by inherited birthright. There is parallel across civilisations and cultures, from ancient Egypt to twentieth century Japan or twenty‐first century Cambodia. Indeed, the current Thailand constitution (Section 6) describes the King as holding a position of revered worship. The notion of the moral potency of the imperial lineage in Japan is vividly conveyed in Hiroike (2002) II, Ch. 13 A & B; for a comparison with the Divine Right of Kings, see III, pp. 65–7. In the wake of transition to constitutional democracies, the deference to elected leaders and to the will of the majority may for some still contain a sense of divine indebtedness, albeit mediated through a no less God‐given right to vote.

8. ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes the freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance’. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as adopted by the United Nations in 1948. ‘Possessed of reason and conscience, every human is obliged to behave in a genuinely human fashion, to do good and avoid evil!’ Endorsed by 1993 World Parliament of Religions as part of its commitment to pursue a common Global Ethic (Kung & Kuschel, 1993). The full text and related resources are available from its continuing Council: http://www.cpwr.org.

9. According to Section 8:3 of the Education Reform Act: ‘Any agreed syllabus….shall reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian whilst taking account of the teaching and practices of the other principal religions represented in Great Britain.’ (GB. Statutes, 1988). This was in direct recognition of the increased diversity of religious communities thriving within the UK, and it was also deliberately reflecting the wider global condition.

10. In government usage the previous terminology of ‘church school’ has been superseded by ‘faith school’ to reflect the fact that though the majority of such schools are related to the Christian communities, there are also publicly funded Jewish, Muslim and Sikh schools, albeit in small but increasing numbers. In its application to all schools, this framework envisages critical reflection within any particular faith as well as a readiness to understand the faith of others.

11. The first slogan was commonly seen on car bumpers in the USA at the time of the Vietnam war and has been newly reproduced in the repetitive chanting by USA soldiers during training in the PC DVD game Vietcong 2 (Kolar, 2005). The second has been seen on a poster on a classroom wall in a Palestinian school, as shown in a UK Channel 4 TV documentary 31 July, 2006: Judah and Mohammed.

12. A devastating collation of publication and distribution in book and televised form is contained in the Wikipedia 2006 entry on the Protocols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion. Because Wikipedia entries are vulnerable to abuse, the extensive corroborative documentation of the extent of current broadcasting of this material is a necessary guarantee that this point is not being exaggerated.

13. Leaving aside the 1605 Gunpowder Plot on Parliament, which was of September 11 proportions, the strength of lethal antagonism which Christianity has engendered is evident in the letter sent by Cardinal Como in 1580 in response to an enquiry to the then Pope Sixtus as to whether it would be sinful for two English nobles to take the life of Elizabeth 1^st: ‘Since that guilty woman of England rules over two noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin, but gains merit, especially having regard to the sentence pronounced against her by Pius V of holy memory. And so if these English nobles decide actually to undertake so glorious work, your lordship can assure them that they do not commit any sin’. Cited in Black (1959), pp. 178–9.

14. Assisted by special grants from the Westhill Trust, there are now ten other Youth SACREs, in the following Local Education Authorities: from 2005 – Bristol, Hounslow, Hull and the East Riding, Portsmouth, Solihull; and from 2006 – Blackburn with Darwen, Kirklees, Newham, Surrey and Tameside.

15. ‘Home grown suicide bombers’ are not an example of any weakness in this model, but rather of its incomplete implementation. An examination of the quality of RE in the schools of the 7 July London bombers shows that it had been characterised as weak by the schools inspection agency, OFSTED, in reports published at the times when they had been at school. This will have impacted both on their own understanding of Islam in relation to other religions and on the attitudes towards the Muslim community of their non‐Muslim peers in the same schools. See Campaign against terrorism – a paper prepared by the Religious Education Council of England and Wales, July 2005.