ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss Michael Apple’s concept of ‘selective tradition’ as the analytical lens to understand the manifestation of misclusion of religion and secular worldviews in Religious Education (RE), and to interrogate the question of religion and RE as (de)legitimised knowledge in society and curriculum, respectively. Michael Apple’s theory of selective tradition provides an appropriate analytical framework for understanding how the misrepresentation and misclusion of religion in RE occurs. In liberal-secularised society, religion as a field of knowledge is increasingly under the spotlight regarding its utility, because it is perceived as lacking a performative function in a competitive market economy. In countries where religion remains a powerful socio-cultural force, legitimisation of the majority religion and delegitimisation of the religious ‘other’ occurs in a nation-state. Sceptics argue that the natural scepticism that arises in response to competing and incompatible religious truth claims invalidates any attempt to impose, educationally, a community’s worldview on the autonomous individual.
