Critical Realism as a Tool for the Interpretation of Cultural Diversity in Liberal Religious Education

Abstract

In traditional forms of ‘confessional’ religious education, concerned primarily to nurture children within a specific faith, religious culture could be interpreted from the perspective of the relatively monolithic culture of the host faith community. Thus, for example, traditional confessional religious education in England and Wales sought to nurture children in the Christian faith in a manner inclusive of the perspectives of a range of different Protestant churches. Despite significant denominational differences, locally Agreed Syllabuses were able to achieve a level of unanimity about the nature of Christianity and the way it should be taught in the classroom. With the advent of forms of liberal religious education operating in a multi-faith context and seeking to cultivate religious understanding in an open non-confessional manner, this consensus quickly fragmented. Liberal religious educators faced the daunting task of interpreting religion in a pluralistic context in which there was no shared understanding of the nature of religion. The plurality of contrasting and contradictory interpretations of religion—religious and secular, universal and tradition-specific—made the search for a mutually acceptable framework for religious education increasingly problematic. In this context the search for secure foundations for the theory and practice of religious education needs to give way to the looser notion of a set of provisional heuristic guidelines. This chapter sets out to identify the criteria that such guidelines will need to meet if they are to do justice to the integrity of the vast range of different interpretations of religion currently competing with one another. It proposes that the philosophy of critical realism offers religious educators the possibility of reaching agreement on just such a set of guidelines.