The British Council of Churches’ Influence on the ‘Radical Rethinking of Religious Education’ in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

It is widely accepted that during the later 1960s, Religious Education (RE) in English state-maintained schools underwent a significant transition, moving from a Christian ‘confessional’ approach to an academic study of world religions. A detailed examination of the activities of the British Council of Churches’ Education Department during the period reveals examples of an active promotion of this study of world religions, something that hitherto has been absent from the historiography of RE. For example, the department organized key conferences, meetings and consultations, at which future directions for RE were considered and discussed. A research project undertaken for the department in the later 1960s, which led to the 1968 report Religion and the Secondary School, was prompted by the identification that ‘[t]oday the needs of children and young people demand a radical rethinking and reshaping of the purpose and method of religious education’. This report included a statement specifically encouraging the study of non-Christian religions, which was repeated in later key documents. This article shows how the British Council of Churches’ Education Department played a role in the development of the ‘non-confessional’ study of world religions in English state-maintained schools from as early as the late 1940s.