Rite and Reason: Religion and the civic space. Kevin Williams reflects on the French and Norwegian approaches
The school curriculum is used in most countries as an instrument of public policy through which national self-understanding is expressed and communicated to the young generation. This has been the tradition in Western Europe since the Reformation when each ruler used schools to promote the religion of his region.
In most liberal democracies today, the notion of using the curriculum to promote a particular religious view of the world would not be acceptable and accordingly parents enjoy the right to withdraw their children from direct religious instruction.
This is all unexceptionable but what happens when the teaching of religion is completely banned in school?
What are the consequences of such an exclusion where religious tradition is a significant feature of a culture and where the acquisition of cultural understanding assumes some level of initiation into this tradition?
An understanding of religion is necessary to an informed response of the considerable body of religiously inspired poetry, music and art within the Western culture. Without this understanding we read, for example, of young people, on seeing a painting of the Madonna, asking "Who is the chick in the painting?"
Here we are not talking of the absence of religious faith but of cultural ignorance. How can young people encounter the religious dimension of a culture in secular school contexts in non-confessional liberal democracies?
In France, this issue has come to the fore with secularists and believers expressing concern at the religious illiteracy (l'inculture religieuse or analaphabétisme religieux) on the part of young people.
There the state school is conceived as a rigorously secular civic space in which any expression of religious commitment is prohibited including, most controversially, the wearing of Islamic headscarves but also other conspicuous religious symbols.
Even the teaching of history of religions or religious studies has been indicted as a Trojan horse designed to subvert the secular polity.
Norway has a much more inclusive model of the relationship between faith and the state. The principal document on the Norwegian curriculum affirms that education "shall be based on fundamental Christian and humanistic values" and argues that "Christian and humanistic values both demand and foster tolerance, providing room for other cultures and customs."
Yet the authors are not unmindful of the challenge that can be entailed in reconciling educational aims. The second of four "seemingly contradictory aims" is identified as providing "familiarity with our Christian and humanist heritage - and knowledge of and respect for other religions and faiths".
This approach is perfectly compatible with liberal democratic principles.
On the one hand, these principles require that teachers of religion in confessional contexts deal honestly with secular world views.
On the other hand, in secular environments, the same principles require that any education that claims to be comprehensive gives young people an opportunity to acquire some kind of experience of religion from the inside.
The range and complexity of the human response to the world cannot be accommodated through laïcité or secular neutrality alone or even through the study of the sociology of religion. This response will require a specialised and focused attention that it could not be expected to receive via the inter disciplinary or cross-disciplinary treatment of religion advocated in France.
Religion is too embracing a human practice to be covered in this way and this approach is unlikely to accommodate the kind of imaginative dwelling with religious experience that is required to come to understand it properly.
This is not to argue for a form of narrow denominational catechesis but rather for a generously conceived and imaginatively designed multi-confessional programme that allows for the exploration of all religious beliefs and of agnostic and atheistic world views. At the entrance to the Rhine falls there is a plaque that contains a quotation from Psalm 150 Verse 6 ". . . Praise God in his temple on earth,/ praise him in his temple in heaven . . ." Beneath it are the following lines from Swiss poet, Eduard Mörike. "Oh traveller, be careful and hold your heart very firm in your hands - I nearly lost mine out of joy by watching the powerful play of huge masses of water thundering down the falls and breaking the surface below, causing a mist rising high . . ."
This seems to me to be another perfectly apposite conjunction of the sacred and the secular dimensions of the Western cultural heritage. Both strands of this heritage have a place in the educational experience of young people.