ABSTRACT
Religious education was equated with Christian education, a form of instruction that had moral and civic goals. The complexity of the issues concerning plurality has become more evident, and debates about religious and values education have taken account of this wider understanding of plurality. Traditional plurality corresponds to the observable cultural diversity present in many Western societies. Modern plurality relates to the variegated intellectual climate of late modernity or postmodernity. Modernism' is the ideological response that embraces 'modernity' while 'postmodernism' is the range of ideological responses that embrace 'postmodernity'. Inflexible and narrow views of national, ethnic and religious identity tend to emerge when fixed and bounded views of the nature of cultures are combined with reified views of nationality, ethnicity and religion. Ethnic groups are popularly thought of as having a common ancestry and descent, marked by some form of cultural continuity which distinguishes them from other groups around them.
