Mapping the moral assumptions of multi-faith religious education

Abstract

When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject's moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical ideas. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of a rhizome, we make two novel contributions to scholarship in this regard. First, through some salient examples we show the connections between the moral aims of multi-faith RE and the assumptions of Kantian moral religion. The second contribution, building on this analysis, identifies three moral justifications of multifaith RE: universalist (founded on assumptions of moral universals across religions), vicarious (the support of a religious worldview by using other religions' moral teachings) and instrumentalist (a moral justification based on the supposed extrinsic benefits of studying religions). We then go onto consider how these assumptions may differ from the moral commitments of the religions they appropriate, suggesting they disrupt and recombine theocentric concepts into pedagogic ones.

Religious Education's Relevance in Nigeria's Tertiary Institutions

“…In France, the government does not recognize religion or fund religious education. In Alsace-Moselle, the state generally supports public education in several faiths, such as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, by the German model (Moulin-Stozek & Metcalfe, 2018). Religious instruction in public schools is opposed for various reasons, such as that it entails the state endorsing or establishing whatever religious views are being taught.…”

Religious education teachers’ perspectives on character education

“…Different approaches to moral development in RE have also been identified, which are articulated in deontological and virtue ethics frameworks (Moulin-Stożek and Metcalfe, 2018).…”

“…The study of religion was officially renamed to religious education in the Education Act 1944, but it was from the 1960s onwards that religious education began transitioning from a confessional approach to the multi-faith approach enshrined in the later Education Reform Act 1988 (ibid.). However, RE was still widely regarded to have a moral aim as religions were, on the whole, considered to constitute comparable systems of moral conduct, with the ideas of learning about and from religions providing the stimulus for pupils to develop morally (Moulin-Stożek and Metcalfe, 2018).…”