Sensus Divinitatis

Guest blogger: Leo Van Arragon is an independent scholar, who, after a 37 years as an education professional in privately funded schools in Ontario, earned his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa in 2015. His thesis topic and research area is the politics of religion in state funded schools and his thesis title is “We Educate, They Indoctrinate: Religion and the Politics of Togetherness in Ontario Public Schools.” He has written some articles and book chapters and his current research is in the politics of religious literacy with a book in the making, provisionally titled Reflections on Religious Literacy.  He lives in Strathroy, Ontario, is married with three children and five grandchildren. He also gardens, cycles, camps, and reads murder mysteries.

In Canada, we are cautious about religion. We want to be known as tolerant of religion and religious diversity, but we tend to avoid actually talking about it at any depth. We may know people who are deeply religious, who really do believe that the Qur’an is divinely inspired, that Joseph Smith really did get a direct revelation from God through a visitation by the angel Moroni, or that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and rose again to ascend into heaven.  And we are mostly OK with that from a distance.

What makes us more wary is the belief that these events actually occurred in history, that they are central to the human story, that the religious texts are authoritative for the way many do life in all its embodied complexity.  Did Jesus really rise from the dead?  What about the revelations received by Muhammed and Joseph Smith? What are the implications for our life if that really were the case?  What if these particular events are considered an unalterable historical fact to which I must respond? 

OK, that’s not our real problem when it comes to the Canadian public. Our real problem is what to do with people who really believe these things AND demand public space for their voices and their religious language and practices. Most of us agree that there should be religious freedom, and, in fact, “religious freedom” is seen as a marker distinguishing enlightened societies from less enlightened ones. At the same time, we worry about the ways in which expressions of religion can disrupt our lives, doing harm in society (or: “in our public institutions”).  The extremes include violence narrated in the name of religion (like the Toronto 18 or Nathaniel Veltman running down a Muslim family in London, Ontario) but even without that, harm can include harmful ideas about, among other things, gender, and science. We are living in an historical moment when common ground is harder to find, as political and social fault lines seem more entrenched, deeper, and more difficult to navigate.  

Religion seems out of step with the modern world in which common ground is established by science, human rights, and rational thought.  However, religious beliefs and communities are not going to disappear and, after a period when we believed that a process we call secularization might put take care of it once and for all, we are seeing religion re-emerge and even surge in multiple ways.  The re-emergence of religion as a public force has led governments around the world to invest in studies and programs designed to manage religious devotion, religious communities and religious diversity.

Two Political Options

Broadly speaking, state actors assess forms of religion along three lines, deciding which ones can be seen as partners in delivering social cohesion, which ones can be tolerated, and which ones are threats, both to social order and the well being of individuals.  In this context, there are two categories of response: one category of response includes coercive measures, including the use of law and regulation, security measures, police procedures, tax law, etc. These structures contain, direct, and restrain religious commitment and expression through government policy and procedure.

The other category includes persuasion, which is where I have done my work, specifically in the politics of religion and education. Education is persuasion by another name, the purpose of education being to deliver a preferred graduate profile without resorting to coercion.  Education is never religiously neutral, whether it be delivered by “religious” organizations and groups or by states and state actors who claim to be “secular”.  The point is that any educational program is designed to deliver a graduate who thinks about the world in the ways preferred by those who are in control of the process and rejects forms of thinking and being, including religion, that are assessed as harmful.  This seems obvious in what we call “faith-based schools”, either privately or state funded, but it is equally true for what we call “public schools”^[1] which are state projects controlled by state actors self identifying as “secular” and “religiously neutral”.   

States and their schools are never religiously neutral.  Rather, they operate with a preferred model of religion that fits well into preferred social order.  A common theme is that states and state constitutions use the term “secular” to identify the state stance in relationship to religion.  A global survey suggests that “secular” indicates state investment in preferred ways which states and state actors want their citizens to think and act with regard to religion.^[2]

There is a growing body of literature suggesting that “secularism” is productive and, if you think of “religion” in a more broad and inclusive sense of “ultimate values and meanings,” you might think of “secularism” as a form of religion.  “Public education” is a persuasive exercise to deliver religiously literate citizens, who are familiar with preferred civic expectations, attitudes, and skills, about, among other things, religion. Rather than being religiously neutral, “secular” might well be thought of as a term used to mask the use of state power in education to achieve a particular kind of religious citizen.^[3]

What I am challenging here is the notion that the state should have a privileged role in determining the religious orientations of a nation. The cultural arena of religious institutions and their teachings should have a degree of autonomy from state control. While Canadian dominant culture rightly fears religious extremism, it should also have a healthy wariness for state management and manipulation of religion.

“Religious literacy” has been the focus of a great deal of state funding, particularly in European states and in the UK.  Other states around the world have followed suit, “religious illiteracy” having been linked to “religious fundamentalism” and “religious extremism.” In state schools, the outcomes of religious literacy programs are defined in terms of civic skills and attitudes rather than religion itself. It does not matter to states in liberal democracies whether people believe in the Virgin birth. What does matter is that citizens do NOT make a nuisance of themselves in asserting their beliefs. That leaves religion in an ambiguous place in academic programs. Given the cultural baggage associated with “religion” as a category, educators in public education systems tend to be reluctant to actually spend time and resources on it. The logic is that we do not really need religion if we think of it as a matter of private preference and choice and if the preferred civic skills and attitudes can be achieved without reference to religion.  

Ontario public education, the jurisdiction with which I am most familiar, made that logical choice. After a brief experiment with “education about religion” following 1990, it was replaced with “character education” in 2008. The point of education about religion was to have students know enough about “world religions” to be tolerant of the forms of it which showed up in their lives.  The switch to character education was not religiously neutral. The implication is that, although religion and religious literacy might be important to some of us, it is not important in a public sense. What we want to achieve is citizens who adopt the character trait of being tolerant of religious diversity while not letting religion get in the way of the secular matters that make up our common or public life. We do not actually need to know much about religion itself to get there, at least in Ontario public education thinking.^[4]

A Fresh Take on Public “Religion”

However, I argue that we lost something along the way in relegating “religion” and religious literacy to the broom closet of our education programs. My argument depends on my definition of religion and of literacy and does not include making students more tolerant.  Sometimes it should make them less tolerant. That’s a matter for another blog post.  For now, here’s my argument.  First, literacy. Literacy involves the basics of the 3 R’s but, more than that, it involves the making of meaning. In other words, we want our students to be able to read but, more than that, we want to understand the meaning of what they read. ^[5] What I am arguing is that “religion” should be considered a “fourth R.”  

Second, religion. The common usage of religion includes references to “faith” or “belief” in some forms of transcendent reality, such as deities, and various forms of “religious practice”, including rituals, worship under the leadership of some form of religious authority. This means that some of us are religious while others are not. It creates a sharp distinction between “the religious and the secular”, between “religion and science” and so forth. Religion is often linked to a more traditional past when we did not know as much as we do now about how the world actually works while science is seen as more characteristic of the modern and progressive mind.  

However, I invite you to consider another way of thinking about religion, which links it more intimately to “literacy.” For one thing, there are forms of religion that do not include deities and our politics and social lives are animated by all manner of “beliefs.” There are “humanist beliefs” and our public education systems refer to “transcendent” or “universal” values—like tolerance, rights or sustainability. We may think of our national rituals as “secular” but they look religious to many observers.  Besides, “religion” is not going anywhere so, the idea that some of us have advanced beyond our need for religion, having become more rational and modern creates social hierarchies that deserve critical reconsideration. The point is that the distinction between religion and the secular may not be as clear as it is represented to be.  

This levels the playing field in discussions of religion in Canada. Everyone brings some religious bias, some religious orientation into public discourse.^[6] So rather than thinking of religion primarily in terms of socially constructed beliefs and practices, which live in parallel, private universes, I invite you to think of it in terms of a fundamental human capacity or way of knowing the world.  Which begs the question, what kinds of knowledge do we generate when we think religiously? What questions do we formulate and answer when we think religiously? 

Well, consider this.  We are animals, mammals to be specific and, like all other mammals, we die.  However, unlike other mammals, we think and worry about it. In fact, much of our cultural production is about the meaning of our brief journey in time and space. We are aware of the passage of time, and we want to make the most of it. There is little evidence that my dog worries about death and the passage of time and the meaning of his life. I talk to him about religious literacy and secularism, but, while he responds to my voice, hoping to go for a walk, he does not seem to have an opinion about Christian nationalism—something I worry about. 

So, we are mammals with a unique capacity to think about meaning, to construct universal values, to evaluate our social lives based on what we imagine to be normative, transcending time and space. That’s religion. The term religion carries a lot of freight, much of it related to abuses of power, colonialism, and stupidity but so do terms like science, the arts and politics. “Religion” shows up in all manner of beliefs and practices but the focus on socially constructed beliefs and practices misses what I think of as a fundamental and universal human capacity.

There is something religiously “there” that is part of human nature; part of every culture, articulated or unarticulated. We are homo religio. We think about our origins and our future, what’s wrong with the world and how to restore it. We ask: why are am I here?

I invite you to think of it in terms of the difference in status between questions and answers.  Here’s a question:  What is the chief end of man? If you go to the Shorter Westminster Catechism, you find an answer, which is that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and to worship him forever.” OK, obviously a religious answer in a Christian tradition. Problematic for sure which has led some of us to reject, not only the Christian tradition but religion itself as a legitimate source of knowledge and wisdom. Problematic for two reasons, one of which is its older gender exclusive language and the other is that many of the people who confessed it also engaged in human trafficking and the design and implementation of colonial policies including residential schools for indigenous people.   

However, think about this.  The fact that we might reject the answer does not make the question go away.  The point of the question is, what is the meaning of my life? Do dogs ask the question of the meaning of their lives? It’s hard to get into the mind of a dog, but there is not much evidence they do. People have a kind of consciousness that includes the capacity to ask pesky questions, some of which keep us awake at night, standing on the stage with Macbeth as he descends into despair, and try to get our kids to school on time so they will have a meaningful life.  

Are we all religious? Not if you concentrate on particular beliefs and practices but, yes, if you think of religion as a particular kind of consciousness or capacity to ask questions about meaning and purpose. That’s where I have landed, which has taken me the next question, about religious literacy and its value in any education endeavour. I argue that religious literacy should be an important component in any academic program.  

Critical Religious Literacy

First, our students are on a spirit quest and we are being less than honest if we present ourselves to be neutral about where they land on questions of the ultimate meaning and purpose of their lives. ^[7] In other words, their religious lives are important to us as families, as teachers, schools, and states.  Education, in any meaningful sense, includes equipping our children with the language to engage the big questions they need to answer for themselves. Education is not, in the first place, indoctrination; teachers and parents know that there are no guarantees about where our students will land with their lives.  We can guide them, but they will make their own choices. Education has lots of potential for unintended consequences. However, we have a professional obligation to equip them to engage level of consciousness about the meaning of their lives and their world.  

Second, they need to know how to engage in religious critical thinking about their worlds. By that I mean that the cultural products, the institutions, the practices, social conventions are embodiments of ultimate values, designed to create an ideal society and world.  Nothing we do and see is value neutral or arbitrary. It is all contingent, social constructed, limited, and directive. Good, critical religious thinking equips students to trace their everyday worlds as embodiments of ultimate values and purpose. Our students are surrounded by all manner of influencers engaged in persuasion to one or other form of a good life—from advertisements to movies to the news and their friends. I am not saying that we need our students to land in a particular form of religion although any school system will be designed to lead students in a preferred direction to a preferred end. School systems cannot be neutral either, being embodiments of ultimate beliefs about life, the universe and everything (nod to Douglas Adams 1982). 

What I am arguing for here is that religious literacy is an integral component of an education, equipping students to engage their own spirit quests and to develop critical thinking skills about the ultimate values and purposes of the everyday stuff of their lives. So, this is a case for religious literacy, not because it will make our students more tolerant or conversations more “safe.” In fact, sometimes religious literacy will and should make them less tolerant–of evil, I hope, in whatever form it may show up. It may be awkward and even uncomfortable. Religious literacy equips our students to make radical assessments of their world, which will sometimes lead them to be socially disruptive by saying “no” at times. For education to mean something, it has to equip our students to engage in truly radical thinking.^[8] That’s the brass ring of religious literacy.   

Sources

Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press  

Ellis, J.E. 2023. The Politics of Religious Literacy:  Education and Emotion in a Secular Age.  Leiden:  Brill.

Gray, J. 2018. Seven Types of Atheism. New York: Picador.

Wolterstorff, N. 2019.  Religion in the University.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

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^[1] I am using “public schools” in the North American meaning which links the meaning of public to anything managed and controlled by states and state actors. The British meaning of public indicates something different.  

^[2] The Routledge International Handbook of Religious Education (2012), a global survey of state management of religious education through regulation and funding mechanisms, is a good source.

^[3] There is quite a lot of critical literature challenging the idea that secularism is religiously neutral.  Talal Asad (2003) argues that secularism is a political doctrine associated with modernity which he describes as a “project” (13).  John Gray (2018) in his analysis of atheism and Justine Ellis (2023), examining “religious literacy” argue something similar.   

^[4] There are other examples: Reports advocating for religious literacy in the UK, Australia and Zambia (to name just some examples) include references to reluctance of educators and schools to spend time and resources on RE and anxiety about the vulnerable place of RE in state schools.  

^[5] The UNESCO website on RE is just one example linking literacy to meaning. The Ontario public education website on literacy refers to the “big questions” we want our students to retain after they have forgotten a lot of what we tried to teach them. So, literacy and “meaning” are very closely linked. You can find other examples if you go on state education websites and look for “literacy.”

^[6] Nicholas Wolterstorff (2019) argues this in Religion in the University.

^[7] I am drawing on Indigenous wisdom using the phrase “spirit quest.”  It is easy for us to think of a spirit quest as unique to indigenous groups but I have started thinking about “education” through that lens.

^[8] I am thinking of “radical” in terms of its Latin origin “radix” or “root.”  I am arguing that we want our students to get below the surface of their everyday worlds to identify the roots of what they see around them, much of what we accept as normal but which is anything but normal.  I am thinking of climate change, poverty, runaway capitalism … you can fill in the blanks.