Religion, Education, and the State in Post‐Communist Europe: Making Sense of the Diversity of New Church‐State Practices

Abstract

The demise of the Communist Party’s monopoly over education in Europe created a new dilemma for educational leaders in post-Communist states. They faced a difficult question: How should a nation-state that accepts ideological pluralism handle the difficult relationship between religion and education? As is well known, Western liberal democracies do not provide consistent answers to this question. They all reject the Soviet approach of inculcating one comprehensive secular ideology and outlawing all alternatives. All of them, as will be discussed below, also allow various forms of confessional religious education at primary, secondary, and higher levels. Nonetheless, beyond these basic commonalities there exists a tremendous diversity of practice. The teaching of religion in state schools provides a leading example of the variety of approaches taken by liberal democracies. Some countries, such as France, offer no religious instruction in public schools (Willaime 2007b). Other countries, including Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, and Malta, allow and even encourage confessional religious instruction (Willaime 2007a). A few countries, such as Sweden, offer nonconfessional religious education that attempts to take an objective approach to religion. Finally, in countries such as Norway, one may also find in the public education system a competition between the latter two approaches (Skeie 2007; Willaime 2007a). In other areas of education, such as state funding of religious forms of higher and lower education, one may find a similar diversity. Two recent studies provide typologies of liberal democratic approaches to church-state issues (Monsma and Soper 1997; Madeley 2003). The typology developed by Stephen Monsma and J. Christopher Soper (1997) is perhaps