Religious education for political thinking and citizenship

Abstract

The curricular accommodation of religious education is almost always dissociated from the latter's political significance and the teaching of religious worldviews is often limited to serving social, (multi) culturalist and epistemological purposes. When RE is made relevant to political identity this occurs strictly within the confines of a liberal sense of citizenship. In this article, the relevance of religious teaching to citizenship is approached through a lens that is critical of liberal secularism and of its confounding view of the social and the political while distant from faith- and validity-based debates on RE. The article aims to render some rigid demarcations of politics and religiousness problematic and to show that religions comprise portrayals of egalitarianism and visions of a better life that can become taught material conducive to a reflective political citizenship beyond liberalism.