Religious Symbols in Public Schools as Teachable Controversies in Religious Education

Christian Moe

doi:10.26529/cepsj.693

Abstract

This focus issue of CEPS Journal raises two topics usually treated separately, Religious Education and the use of religious symbols in public schools. Both involve the challenge of applying liberal democratic principles of secularism and pluralism in a school setting and refract policies on religion under conditions of globalisation, modernisation and migration. I take this situation as a teachable moment and argue that it illustrates the potential of a particular kind of Religious Education, based on the scientific Study of Religion, for making sense of current debates in Europe, including the debate on religious education itself. However, this requires maintaining a spirit of free, unbiased comparative enquiry that may clash with political attempts to instrumentalise the subject as a means of integrating minority students into a value system.

Highlights

This special issue of CEPS Journal raises two topics, Religious Education (RE) and religious symbols in public schools, which are usually treated separately, by different disciplines – respectively, those concerned with religion and teaching, and those concerned with law and public policy
The two topics are linked in at least two ways. Both are concerned with the challenge of applying liberal democratic principles of secularism and pluralism in the public institutions of societies increasingly characterised by a plurality of religions and world-views
While I think Study of Religion (SR) offers a bit more than this, an educated taste is in itself a fine aim of a liberal education, and it could in time lead to more well-informed public debate and policy on religion than we find in the cases discussed below

Summary

Introduction

This special issue of CEPS Journal raises two topics, Religious Education (RE) and religious symbols in public schools, which are usually treated separately, by different disciplines – respectively, those concerned with religion and teaching, and those concerned with law and public policy. Controversies over religious symbols in public schools in Europe, too, have escalated from headmasters’ offices through governments all the way to the ECtHR They have mainly concerned whether Christian crucifixes or crosses may be displayed in classrooms and whether Muslim teachers or pupils may wear various forms of covering (hijab) including headscarves. Switzerland (ECtHR, 2001), the case of a teacher prohibited from wearing a headscarf while teaching, it dismissed her application as unfounded This paradox is mostly explained by the court’s deference to state authorities in religious matters (states’ ‘margin of appreciation’) and the difficulty of developing a consistent European jurisprudence on religion when states have markedly different traditions of secularism and state-church relations. Observations of similar court cases on religion, and of the ‘murky mixture’ of arguments about religious symbols that inform judges’ decisions, have led some to declare ‘the impossibility of religious freedom’ as a justiciable legal right (Sullivan, 2005, esp. pp. 5–8)

Teachable controversies

Discussion