Young people and religious diversity

As we look at previous chapters in this volume and consider the scope and depth of studies conducted across the UK and Europe about youth, education and young people’s attitudes towards religious diversity, one point is eminently clear: Canada lags far behind in analogous empirical research. With few exceptions, ¹ our review of literature demonstrates that comprehensive education about religious diversity is either largely absent in public school ² curricula or loosely embedded in other academic subjects such as history, social studies or citizenship education. Outside of Québec – the Canadian province which received significant scholarly attention for its implementation of a secular, compulsory programme, comparable in content to religious education (RE) – the paucity of research, and in particular the lack of ethnographic studies about teacher and student experiences with religious diversity, is disquieting. ³ We must also clarify that the idea of ‘religious education’ or ‘religion education’ can be conceptually ambiguous in the Canadian context since it has no stable meaning across provinces, referring to confessional, denomination-specific instruction in some or to world religions curricula in others. ⁴ Finding a common lexicon is correspondingly problematic. In contrast to other countries like the UK, where the use of the abbreviation RE immediately connotes a broadly understood model of instruction that pays heed to religious diversity, there is no Canada-wide consensus about what to even call such a programme of study. Complicating this problem of nomenclature and lack of empirical data, the issue of religion and education is, on the one hand, a non-issue for many Canadians (as we explain later). On the other hand, it is the focus of increasing levels of public scrutiny from a variety of religious and secular stakeholders pressing for change (at least concerning the questions of public support for confessional or faith-based schools or religious education in these schools). Such changes include requests for exemptions to compulsory religion courses in confessional schools and agitation for policy amendments to end public funding that exclusively serves Catholic education (primarily in the province of Ontario) (see Duffy 2012; Hammer 2014; Prince and Bishop 2014). These issues have proven to be particularly litigious over the last several decades, with Canada even coming under international censure by the United Nations Human Rights Committee for religious discrimination in the decision of Waldman v. Canada ⁵ (UNHRC 1999; UNHRC-CCPR 2006, 5). While the complex fiscal and constitutional controversies that animate debate over confessional public education are beyond the scope of this chapter, they nevertheless serve to contextualize the discussion of religion and education in Canada. ⁶ Collective concern (both from academia and from the vox populi) about government responses to religious diversity writ large, and religion and education in particular, however, are core research foci of the Religion and Diversity Project. Thus, the first section of this chapter offers a brief history of religion and education in Canada, a description of the Religion and Diversity Project and a snapshot of the current status of our research with observations about the most significant gaps in knowledge. The second section offers commentary on the strengths of the WRERU project’s methodological approaches and how key findings about context, aversion to conflict and the theoretical footings of education about religion may inform our research strategies. The third section presents findings from qualitative research conducted in relation to the Religion and Diversity Project. This research focuses on how and to what extent young adults educated in Canadian school systems actually end up understanding religion and religious diversity in the context of their own religious identities, even when they have been exposed to little or no religious education in those schools. We conclude with questions about the potential benefits and possible dangers of normative approaches to teaching about religion and worldviews, how findings from the WRERU project may inform the design of our own project in Canada and the imperative of context-specific, interdisciplinary research.