If you don’t know the difference you are living with, how can you learn to live with it? Taking difference seriously in spiritual and religious education

Abstract

This article discusses the implications of difference in relation to religious education, multiculturalism and contemporary ‘terrorist’ global activity. It argues that the model for religious education in England and Wales has not been sufficient in addressing children’s spiritual development. Religious education has been pursued through the lens of multiculturalism (more recently understood as interculturalism or pluralism), with the idea that diversity is an enrichment to society and not a danger to morally agreed codes of conduct or social cohesion. This form of religious education has not sufficiently addressed the ideological bases and political activity that religious faith entails. As a result, young people are insufficiently spiritually educated to deal with and adequately evaluate and respond to the realities of the modern world within which spiritual conviction has presented itself as a divisive as well as a cohesive factor. Although the context for this chapter is religious and spiritual education in the UK, the question raised for those working within other national contexts is whether their own system is more sufficient than the UK model.