Data Check

Commission on Religious Education
The number of students being entered for the public examinations in Religious Studies in England and Wales (GCSE, at 16 and A level, at 18) fell significantly in the summer of 2018, and more than a third of schools are breaking the law by failing to provide Religious Education (RE). The decline can be explained in part by educational policy decisions, for example RE is currently excluded from the EBacc, a group of GCSE subjects which are viewed by government as a performance measure for schools. Policy decisions both reflect and feed public assessments of the value of subjects, and public support for RE is demonstrably low. Perhaps the public imagines (rightly or wrongly) that RE is aligned with religion itself, and thus the subject suffers with the same ‘toxicity’ that Linda Woodhead considers attaches to the ‘brand’ of religion. Whatever the case, confusion about the aims and purposes of the subject in schools is unlikely to support its flourishing.

A report published in September 2018 by the Commission on Religious Education entitled Religion and Worldviews: the Way Forward: A National Plan for Religious Education attempts to tackle these problems. Its central proposal is for a change in the law to ensure that all pupils in England, no matter what type of school they attend, receive their ‘National Entitlement’ to education about religion and worldviews. The report, authored by fourteen Commissioners from a range of sectors (including academics, teachers, headteachers and consultants, a broadcaster and a Human Rights lawyer), was the culmination of two years of intensive consultation with a range of stakeholders, and an ambitious attempt to bring the whole ‘RE Community’ together to push for statutory change. Considering the neo-liberal fragmentation of the education system over the last two decades, and the growth in the number of schools with a religious character, this attempt to achieve consensus on the core content of RE is indeed ambitious. The Commission on Religious Education’s report is not the only one published in recent months suggesting ways forward for the subject. Linda Woodhead and former Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke, recently published A New Settlement Revised: Religion and Belief in Schools. Though the detail of their recommendations differs, both reports lobby for urgent governmental intervention to secure a place for an academically credible subject on the school curriculum.

At a recent RE research and policy conference #2020RE, Dr Wendy Dossett had the opportunity to chat with two of the Commissioners and authors of the Religion and Worldviews report, Dr Joyce Miller and Prof Eleanor Nesbitt, along with Religious Education sociologist (and convener of SOCREL), Céline Benoit. Their conversation ranged over some of the following issues: the rationale for the move from calling the subject ‘Religious Education’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’; the inadequacy for the classroom of a world religions approach; the degree to which faith communities are entitled to influence what gets taught in schools; and the anomaly of the so-called withdrawal clause.

Listeners outside the UK context may be unfamiliar with the following terms:
Key Stages (introduced in the 1988 Education Reform Act) are age related periods in education: Key Stage 1 (aged 5-7), Key Stage 2 (aged 7-11), Key Stage 3 (aged 11-14), Key Stage 4 (aged 14-16), Key Stage 5, (aged 16-18).
SACREs: (Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education) are statutory local education authority bodies, including representation from the Anglican Church, other Christian denominations and other faiths, teacher representatives, and elected council members. SACRES support and resource RE in all local authority schools, and every five years review the locally Agreed Syllabus.

Welcome to the second issue of “Discourse”, where our editors and guests take a critical look at how the category “religion” is being used in the media, the public sphere, and the academic field.

This episode, Chris (Cotter) is joined by Chris (Silver) and Theo Wildcroft, both long-time friends and contributors to the RSP, for a cross-Atlantic discussion. After the inevitable discussion of US identity conflicts and terrorism, and ugly manifestation of the KKK in Northern Ireland, discussion moved on to the accepted protocols of trick or treating, and the use of patisserie in debates on LGBT human rights vs religious freedom.

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Shownotes:

• SSSR Annual Meeting, Las Vegas
• Pittsburgh synagogue shooting: Suspect charged with murder
• Kroger shooting in Kentucky is being investigated as a hate crime
• People in hooded Ku Klux Klan costumes posed outside centre in Newtownards, County Down
• A complete guide to trick or treating – without upsetting any children or neighbours
• Ashers 'gay cake' row: Bakers win Supreme Court appeal

https://twitter.com/Elizrael/status/1056541029472583680

In this interview conducted at the 2018 EASR conference in Bern, Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger speaks to Sammy Bishop about Amma, a guru who has become world famous for her healing hugs - apparently giving more than 33 million hugs over the past 30 years. They discuss the ways in which different audiences can interpret Amma's message, and how she reconnects Hindus in diaspora with their traditions. Focusing particularly on the guru's global reach, Fibiger discusses her fieldwork in Amma's Kerala ashram, and how Western devotees in India are influencing developments there.

How can we move the study of Scientology forward? Academic work is largely stuck in a 'cultic' paradigm, focused on charismatic leadership, 'anti-social' and criminal activity and even brain-washing narratives. Scientology seems almost exclusively to be considered fair game (pun intended) for ridicule and criticism among New Religious Movements, and this may have much to tell us about the theoretical models scholars are using, and the institutional factors at play in the legitimisation of particular traditions in the academic and popular discourse. We discuss insider scholarship and the control of information; the Free Zone and the Church; strategic use of the category 'religion'; and how we see scholarship developing in the post-Hubbard era.

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Following on from the delivery of her conference paper at the EASR 2018 in Bern, in this podcast, Professor Marion Maddox of Macquarie University speaks to Thomas White regarding the historical, national and regional differences in the presence of religion in Australian and New Zealand schools. The podcast begins with a brief biography of Professor Maddox’s rise to academic tenure, and the various post-doctoral positions that paved her transition away from theology, and towards the subject of religion and politics.

Covering projects including the training of Catholic school teachers and deputy-principals in secular religious education, her research into the Hindmarsh Island affair – which investigated Aboriginal women’s claims to ‘secret women’s business’ – and her work under the Australian Parliamentary Research Fellowship, the discussion turns to national differences between public religion in New Zealand and Australia. Contrasting Australian multi-culturalism with New Zealand bi-culturalism, Professor Maddox explains how, despite New Zealand being further along a path of secularisation (by religious affiliation), religion often obtains a greater presence in the public sphere as it is carried on a policy of cultural recognition for Maori tradition, as mandated in the country’s Treaty of Waitangi. This was particularly evident with the daily expression of Maori karakia (prayers) in her daughter’s school, which later transpired to be the Lord’s Prayer!

Focusing on the Australian experience of public policy on religion and education, Maddox explains how 19th Century Australian concerns regarding both sectarianism and protecting religion from political manipulation led to a surprising consensus across colony parliaments that religion should be kept out of the public school system. In the late 20th Century, however, ‘currents of change are pulling in different directions’.

Restrictions on religion rose around the globe in 2016, according to Pew Research Center’s annual study of global restrictions on religion. The share of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose, but the share of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of social hostilities involving religion remained stable. In total in 2016, 83 countries (42%) had high or very high levels of overall restrictions on religion – whether resulting from government actions or from hostile acts by private individuals, organizations and social groups--up from 80 (40%) in 2015 and 58 (29%) in 2007.

In this podcast, we speak with Dr. Katayoun Kishi, who oversaw the ninth in a series of reports by Pew Research Center analyzing the extent to which governments and societies around the world impinge on religious beliefs and practices. We discuss the findings of the report as well as methodology for collecting and analyzing data. Dr. Kishi summarizes findings for different regions of the world--including the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa--and she explains long-term trends evident from Pew's reports.

To measure global restrictions on religion in 2016--the most recent year for which data are available--the study ranks 198 countries and territories by their levels of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. The new study is based on the same 10-point indexes used in the previous studies.

Scholars interested in the dataset can download it for free at PewResearch.org.

In this interview conducted at the 2018 EASR conference in Bern, Sammy Bishop speaks to Manon Hedenborg White about the development of Western esotericism, charting the influence of the infamous Aleister Crowley and his philosophy of Thelema. They explore Crowley's somewhat ambiguous view of gender, before bringing the research into the present day, on how gender roles in contemporary Thelema can be contested and negotiated. Finally, Hedenborg White delves into the important but often overlooked role of women in the development of contemporary Occultism.

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In this podcast, taking place on the last day of the Annual EASR Conference in Bern, Dr Philipp Hetmanczyk and Martin Bürgin of Zurich University talk to Thomas White about the Therwil Affair, a controversy that emerged in 2016 after two Swiss Muslim schoolboys declined to shake hands with their female teacher.

The seemingly rather local, minor incident of two boys declining a handshake in a school just outside of Basel escalated into a major national debate, and was reported in news media across the world. As the issue moved from one of school governance, to public values, to law and later immigration, the Therwil Affair became a focal point for national discussions on religious freedom, gender equality, civic duties, multi-ethnic integration and cultural identity in Switzerland.

As the podcast delves into Swiss political history, Philipp and Martin elaborate on both the conservative and liberal cultural narratives which sought to situate the Muslim schoolboys’ refusal to shake hands. They comment that it is not without some irony that amongst the voices who decried the gender inequality implied in the schoolboys’ actions were the same conservative men who had previously argued against women acquiring the national vote: a policy that did not enter law on a national level until as late as 1971 – and in a specific canton as recently as 1990!

Following an explanation of the historical backdrop to contemporary Swiss ‘culture wars’ that the Therwil Affair spoke so clearly to, the discussion moves to how Swiss educational law has shifted subsequent to the Therwil Affair, with schools now expected to report to Swiss Immigration similar instances of supposed integration failure. With schools being understood not merely as centres for education but also as sites for the teaching and reproduction of standardised norms and values, in countries of religious, ethnic and cultural diversity, the tricky question emerges as to what these norms and values are? Perhaps what may be better, as Philipp suggests, is for schools to resist expectations that they should be cultivating a cultural homogeneity, but focus instead on preparing pupils for moments of cultural difference.