Abstract
In Religion and Belief Literacy: Reconnecting a Chain of Learning, Adam Dinham brings together the results of his research and insights over the last decade. His argument in the introduction and first chapter is that the former strong chain of learning about religion in Britain was broken in the post-war development of the welfare state. This change is characterized as a willing transfer of care from churches to states and was boosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and William Beveridge, leading politician and academic. However, this transfer has finally resulted in a muddled and disconnected educational landscape of religious education, schools more widely, universities, workplaces, and communities. After analysis of such muddles, Dinham proposes a way for bringing each learning space in connection with each other again and in that way restore the chain of learning about religion and belief. The focus is explicitly on ‘religion and belief’, because, according to Dinham, only from such a broader perspective that also includes spirituality and worldviews, adequate justice can be done to the development from 1945 to the present day.
Chapter 2 deals with religion and belief in public policy and the public sphere during the period after the Second World War. In the public sphere, religion and belief were put to the side and belonged to the private sphere, mostly underpinned by secular assumptions. Since the end of the 1980s, however, several philosophers gradually emphasized the important binding role of religions and worldviews in the public square (e.g. Habermas, Hervieu-Leger, Taylor, and Nussbaum). Meanwhile, the religion and belief landscapes were changing, often dramatically due to immigration or extremist actions as on ‘9/11’, which has changed the rhetoric from ‘community cohesion’ and ‘equality, diversity, and inclusion’ to ‘prevention of extremism’.
Chapters 3 to 8 focus, respectively, on religious education, the wider life of schools, university practices, university teaching and learning, professional education and workplaces, and community education and learning. Each chapter presents the internal muddle as conceptual and practical inconsistencies. These muddles make it impossible to interconnect the distinguished learning spaces in a coherent and consistent way.
In chapter 9, ‘The future of religion and belief literacy: reconnecting a chain of learning’, Dinham presents a very helpful table regarding six learning spaces. The table includes ‘key current messages’ and ‘religion and belief literacy messages’ (p. 157-158). The latter form a new and adequate chain of learning messages about religion and belief.
Dinham provides readers with much food for thought, though he focuses specifically on the United Kingdom, both from a historical as well as current point of view. A reader from a different context, as in my own case, who is trying to use the boxes of ‘key current messages’ and ‘religion and belief literacy messages’, needs to fill these boxes on the basis of her/his own contextualized research. For example, from my context in the Netherlands, I need to take into consideration the specific relation of plurality and democracy changing from a pillarized democracy into a de-pillarization one. But this pillarization was already very strong in the interbellum, and I am not sure, whether in the period from 1945 to the present, there was a strong chain of learning spaces, let alone that we have lost such a strong chain.
Given the book’s focus on the UK, I really miss the impact of the 2018 Final Report Religion and Worldviews: The Way Forward. A National Plan for RE of the Commission on Religious Education launched by the UK Religious Education Council, as well as the debates around this report in journals, such as the British Journal of Religious Education, the Journal of Belief and Values, and also in this journal by Trevor Cooling in his ‘The return to worldview: Reflections from the UK’ (2019, 231): 3-9. That is a pity, because the report embodies a real paradigm shift in providing the conceptual and practical apparatus so that all pupils develop a good understanding of the role that worldviews, be they religious or non-religious, play in human life.