What crisis?

BJRE Volume 46:2

Back in 1979, the UK prime minister, James Callaghan, came back from a trip abroad. Everyone in the UK thought we were in the middle of an economic and social crisis at that time (the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’), but Callaghan wanted to be upbeat, and gave an optimistic speech on arriving in the country. The newspaper headlines the next morning summarised his speech as him saying ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ He didn’t use those exact words (a quotation from the 1973 film, The Day of the Jackal), but he certainly gave that impression (López 2014, 98).

Why tell this story? The world is always brimming with crises, and it is important to know when to talk about the crises and when to talk about other things. In 2024 there are national and global crises, wars and environmental crises, personal and universal crises. All have implications for religious education, as each crisis can be described as at least in part caused by or affecting religious communities, and/or religious and non-religious value-systems. Furthermore, religious education may itself be seen as being in the middle of a crisis, at least in some jurisdictions, as a result of, for example, secularisation, religious extremism, ambiguous or misunderstood curriculum aims, or the tensions between educational, religious, and other social expectations. This issue of the BJRE addresses a number of crises – communal, social, educational and political. It would be impossible to address every crisis in a single issue, but it seems helpful to try to understand crisis from the point of view of religious education, here and now. Too often, religious education is seen as of little current relevance, or as backward-looking. Perhaps some religious education is like that, but the research represented here suggests that we – those involved in both teaching and researching religious education around the world – are well aware of crises and, unlike James Callaghan, are prepared to engage directly with those crises, without (one hopes) being overwhelmed by them.

Religious ministers often talk about their work as involving officiating at both weddings and funerals, sometimes on the same day: a schedule of the happiest and the saddest moments in people’s lives. Politicians live the same kinds of lives – even if, unlike religious ministers, the crises are often the fault of the politicians. Religions and religious commitments can cause crises and wars, as can politicians. And, like politicians, religious communities may also be expected to solve some of those crises and wars. For many years, there have been accounts of how inter-communal, interreligious, and single-religion groups may help rebuild societies after war (e.g. Kim and Kollontai 2015; Kollontai and Nesfield 2012) or address climate crises (starting with the biblical ‘stewardship’ narratives) (e.g. Kim and Draper 2011). We are all, in a sense, both problem and solution, and there is no way to escape to a neutral space. As some climate activists have recently said, there is no planet B (Berners-Lee 2021). It was the article by Stefan Altmeyer and Andreas Menne, on the functions of crisis in religious education discourse in UK-based journals since 1975, that first suggested the theme of crisis for this issue of the BJRE. A crisis is a moment where decisions are made, values change, or situations are uprooted. Religious education itself is very well represented in the list of crises covered by this journal and the Journal of Beliefs and Values, but so are wider social, religious and environmental crises, right up to (and beyond) the Covid years. One of the many values of this account is that of quantifying evidence. As a mostly qualitative researcher myself, I have often written of the great value of in-depth analysis of, for example, interview transcripts and observation data. But even in such material, quantitative analysis more can be revealing, as in the case of the research by Altmeyer and Menne. Crises are increasingly frequently noted in articles, over the last half century, and there is a very wide range of types of crisis covered. The need for developing resilience – the ability, broadly, to deal with the kinds of changes that crises represent – is, wisely, one of the most important conclusions from their research.

Focusing specifically on a (perceived) religious crisis, its (hoped for) solution in religious education, and the failure (crisis?) of that very solution, Francis Jonbäck and Carl-Johan Palmqvist write of the world between belief and disbelief, between religion and secularity. The growth in recent years of ‘worldviews’ as a way of understanding or reframing religious education, was initially developed in the writings of Ninian Smart (e.g. Smart 1983), as a response to various forms of secularisation and/or movements away from religious hegemonies (e.g. Smart 1968). More recently, the move towards worldviews education has grown considerably, whether or not secularity is seen as a crisis. However, Jonbäck and Palmqvist describe some of the limitations of such a reframing, as secular and ‘semi-secular’ positions are often untied to a clearly identifiable set of beliefs. ‘Non-doxasticism’ is the wonderful term for such an ambiguous position. But are worldviews, as described in current debates on worldview education, limited to the ‘beliefs’ or ‘philosophies’ that Smart (1999) described? Smart himself, of course, was well aware of the practices and ways of life, and the changing and ambiguous positions of people in conversation within and between religions and worldviews (whatever they are). So how do we deal with such complexity? A different approach is offered by Øyvind Andreassen and Jonathan Doney, providing an account of some of the tensions of inclusion and change in worldview education, and the value of ‘bricolage’ for teachers navigating these changes – changes or crises, one might say.

Andreassen and Doney recognise that bricolage is not a neat solution, and it would in any case depend on what kind of ‘assemblage’ was created, using this technique – as bricolage is not defined in terms of its outcome, only its method. And one of the consequences of the trend in a number of countries over many years to include ‘non-religious’ traditions or belief systems or ways of life, within a subject such as religious education, is that it is not enough simply to open the door in this way. We must also decide who or what should enter by this door. Secular humanism is one of the traditions that, in UK syllabuses and textbooks, often appears in religious education. Philip Barnes reviews the place of humanism in religious education, with a special focus on how representative humanism is of those – almost half the population – who do not explicitly identify as a member of a specific religion. Barnes is right, of course, that being ‘not religious’ is quite distinct from being ‘humanist’, but the two are often combined. This is in part because the tradition of humanism is itself something of a bricolage – a combination of philosophies and beliefs of different kinds, brought together largely because they are not religious and/or because they focus on the human experience. Most religions are also constructed as bricolages, many would say: this does not make them any less significant, so it should not be held against humanism either. And the advantage of having humanism on a syllabus is indeed that it is a recognisable, broad, philosophy that is teachable, whilst ‘atheism’ or ‘agnosticism’ are harder to teach (or to teach positively), and other candidates for inclusion, like environmentalism and communism, may be more politically sensitive.

Yet it does seem reasonable to note, as Barnes does, that amongst those many millions of people who do not self-identify as religious, many do, nevertheless, have beliefs that take them outside the usual – wide – boundaries of secular humanism. Many of the ‘non-religious’ believe in life after death, for example, or in a higher being or in a distinct spiritual world. It also makes good sense to avoid claiming people are humanist who have never identified as such. Many years ago, a UK political party, the Socialist Workers Party, used to recruit by saying ‘Are you a socialist? Are you a worker? Then the SWP is the Party for you’. This is a reasonable recruitment strategy, but the party never claimed that its members did indeed include all socialists who were workers.

If Barnes is describing something of a crisis in the identification and meaning of ‘non-religion’, there are others noting the similar challenges of being religious. Crotty and others have noted the difficulties of leading religious education in Catholic schools, with the ‘bi-dimensional’ pressures from educational and religious organisations (Crotty 2005). Ariel Levin, Daniel Dashevsky and Eli Kohn write about the professional identity of elementary school rabbis in Israel. They note the ‘role ambiguity’ of the rabbis, similar to the experience of many Catholic religious education leaders in Crotty’s article. However, to the authors’ surprise, none of their respondents experienced this as a tension. Perhaps their roles are ‘bricolage’ roles, made up of many disparate elements? In-depth qualitative research that asks participants to describe their own roles certainly avoids any simple generalisations. What comes over strongly is the sense of the rabbis as having a relational, emotional, role in schools. It is good to hear this, and wouldn’t it be good if all adults in schools saw their roles in this way? A crisis – and I need hardly say that Israel has lived with crisis since biblical times – is experienced differently in situations where people have immediate relationships that sustain them, even in the hardest of times.

In those hard times, in the middle of crises, it is sometimes easier to communicate through the creative arts than through documentary materials. Kollontai (2010) researched the use of art in peacemaking in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I was reminded of this when reading Yasemin Güleç’s article on Karagoz shadow plays as an artistic-pedagogical tool in teaching Islam. Güleç notes the value of this technique in ‘healing grief, … protecting from evil, … satirizing social stereotypes, … [and] being used as a form of therapy’. It is easy to think of puppetry as merely entertainment, but such a list of purposes would make many teachers of religious education proud to be held to such aims. The long-standing tradition of using shadow plays, and the consequent ability of these plays to tap into deeply-held beliefs, is also a good way to understand why it may be valuable for young people to study long-standing religious traditions – without implying that the shadow plays, or religions, cannot adapt to new circumstances. Crises such as wars or revolutions often rip up – more or less literally – long-held traditions, and even if there are good reasons for this, the loss is still significant. A good education can look deep into the past, long into the future, and far across the world. The glimpses of different traditions in religious education, described in just this one issue of the BJRE, are illustration of the value of such visioning.

Another article on Islamic education is provided by Imran Mogra, on maktab education – schools sometimes known as madrasah. These are described as a ‘community imperative’, and the largely female staff are described as ‘Muslim ambassadors’. Supplementary schools for Muslims are too often portrayed in the media in non-Muslim countries as a ‘crisis’ in themselves, or as contributing to other crises, and yet the schools can be powerful sources of holistic Islamic identity that help the students develop resilience in the face of (the crisis of) Islamophobia. This odd combination of schools attempting to solve problems imposed by a social system that sees the schools as the problem, is characteristic, sadly, of much education in crisis situations – as represented in many of the articles in this issue. And the under-valuing of female teachers is a feature also of the situation for many in Poland. The need for female role models in school religious education, and their perception by female students, is studied by Magdalena Maciejewska, Joanna Cukras-Stelągowska and Aneta Rayzacher-Majewska. In recent years, Poland has experienced its own internal political and religious crises, as well as the troubling effects of the crises in neighbouring Poland, Belarus and Russia. Having distant and unattainable religious role-models does not seem helpful to the students researched, and the perception of the ’silent presence’ of women in religion is hardly an encouragement, especially to young women tending towards doubting the church to which they nominally belong. Crises in society are not best dealt with, it would seem, by simply being ignored, as Prime Minister Callaghan found to his cost. It is good to see this sympathetic exploration of a form of religious education that, like the maktab schooling, struggles to combine tradition and contemporary relevance. That this struggle can at times be successfully managed is a credit to the good work of many teachers.

Staying in Poland awhile, the research of Daria Hejwosz-Gromkowska and Dobrochna Hildebrandt-Wypych on religion, church, national identity, and the Solidarity movement in school history textbooks, focuses on a more explicitly political crisis in the country. Crises of national identity have been characteristic of Polish history for centuries, as a country subject to repeated invasion by neighbouring countries. The crisis of the 1980s – leading to the downfall of the communist regime – was tied to the Solidarity trade union and to the Catholic church. Over-simplified accounts fail to recognise some of the ambiguities of the organisations, and these make it all the harder for people to understand the more conservative influence of the church in the political crises of more recent years. How history textbooks describe these events is fascinating, and the authors describe how the ‘myths’ became simpler and more dominant, as the decades passed since the crisis of the 1980s. This may be understandable, but it is not good education, and Hejwosz-Gromkowska and Hildebrandt-Wypych describe well the need for students to have access to ‘diverse and often conflicting perspectives’.

Accounts of the crises of the 1970s and 1980s will seem like ancient history to many students and younger teachers. But the complex roles religions play in crises, and the role of education – especially religious education – in helping students understand these crises, helps justify the subject of religious education itself. Those who see only crises all around them may miss the opportunities for nurturing relationships; those who hide crises from view (‘Crisis? What crisis?’) may miss the opportunities for developing resilience and building a better future. A crisis is a moment where decisions are made, values change, or situations are uprooted: it is, amongst other things, a moment of learning. Religious education can contribute positively to our understanding of crises precisely because its subject matter is at the heart of so many crises and also at the heart of so many resolutions of crises.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.