What has morality to do with religious education?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a positive case for increasing the role and importance of religious morality within the subject of religious education in British schools. The argument is structured in the following way. First, attention is given to the diminished role accorded to moral education within religious education that followed the transition from confessional to non-confessional, phenomenological religious education and the reasons for this. Secondly, a genealogical/historical account is constructed that identifies the different ways in which the contribution of religious education to moral education has been conceptualised and practised in post-confessional religious education. Thirdly, the notion that morality and religion are discrete domains of human experience, which has provided the intellectual framework for diminishing the moral content and ambitions of religious education, is criticised as controversial philosophically and as contrasting with the way many religious believers construe the relationship between morality and religion. Finally, there is a short exploration of the ways in which the work of Marius Felderhof in Birmingham provides the intellectual resources to reinstate and reassert the importance and the contribution of religious education to moral education.

Keywords:

• Birmingham Agreed Syllabus
• British religious education
• Euthyphro dilemma
• Felderhof
• moral education
• phenomenological religious education