ABSTRACT
This book began life as a chapter in a projected monograph on critical realism and religious education. The contemporary practice of religious education in the UK tends to occlude questions of realistic truth: Do the generic truth claims of religion in general, or of the truth claims of specific religious traditions in particular, enjoy any epistemic purchase on the ultimate ontological order-of-things? Or do any of the alternative secular accounts of ultimate reality provide us with a more comprehensive, powerful and truthful explanatory model? The reasons for the occlusion of such questions are not difficult to identify: the Enlightenment’s rejection of the epistemic warrant of religious truth claims reduced religious belief to a private affair predicated on an irrational or post-rational leap of faith that precluded informed debate in the public sphere. This, coupled with the Enlightenment’s cultivation of the twin liberal values of freedom of belief and tolerance of the beliefs of others, made a realistically oriented religious education vulnerable to the charge of indoctrination. In some quarters the subject was seen as an agent of Christian confessionalism, striving to impose a set of ideological beliefs upon pupils in a closed and distinctly uncritical manner. The 1970s saw a fundamental paradigm shift in the theory and practice of religious education in state-funded schools in the UK. An open multi-faith approach was adopted, which sought to attend to a range of different religious and secular belief systems without bias or prejudice. In this new situation the charge of indoctrination was avoided by presenting pupils with neutral descriptions of the truth claims of various religious traditions in a manner that tended to avoid discussion of their veracity. As a result, contemporary religious education often leaves pupils free to express their own beliefs and opinions, provided that in doing so they acknowledge and tolerate the beliefs and opinions of others. The frequent absence of any sustained attempt to employ judgemental rationality to critically assess the various ontologically incommensurable truth claims presented in the religious education classroom means that in many instances religious education functions as an instrument for the transmission of liberal ideology, in which an uncritical freedom of expression equates with a thoroughgoing epistemic relativism: ‘You are free to believe whatever you like, regardless of its epistemic warrant and ontological veracity, provided that in doing so you respect and acknowledge the freedom of others to do likewise.’ The problem with this ideological representation of religions is threefold: first, it ignores critical ontological questions of truth and truthful living; second, it imposes a premature and unwarranted epistemic closure by treating all beliefs as equally valid; and third, it perpetuates a widespread religious, spiritual and theological illiteracy among religious believers, secular sceptics, and interested/disinterested agnostics alike.
