ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Contemporary Religious Education in common state schools deliberately nurtures pupils into a distinctively secular liberal understanding of religion. Hence, Thompson's observation that since 'education must of necessity "confess" something', 'non-confessional religious education is founded on a contradiction'. Liberal appeals to the twin virtues of freedom and tolerance have their roots in the educational thought of Locke. The implication of the positions of Gadamer and Newman is clear: when secular liberals give assent to the virtues of reason, freedom and tolerance they do so on the basis of their faith in a distinctively modern worldview brought into being by the Enlightenment. Hence the concern of Christians should not be that nurture per se does not take place, but rather that liberal schools adopt robust nurturing strategies designed to induct children into a variety of forms of agnosticism and theological relativism.
