Religious Diversity, Education, and the “Crisis” in State Neutrality

Abstract

Education—and particularly public education—has become a crucible for the relationship between state and religious diversity, a principal site for contemporary debates about the meaning of secularism and the management of religious difference. This is so across a variety of national traditions, and despite wide differences in the historical and “emotional inheritances” surrounding the configuration of law, politics, and religion. Through an exploration of Hannah Arendt’s thought about responsibility and freedom in education, this article works towards a better understanding of why education is such a crucial and fraught field in the modern encounter between religion and law. The article turns to the recent jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada to draw out the implications of these ideas, arriving ultimately at a claim about the nature and limits of the concept of state neutrality.

Stories Alberta Social Studies Teachers Tell: Influences of Christianity, Liberalism, and Secularism

“…Described by Casanova (2011) as statecraft doctrine, this model separates church and religious authority on the one hand from political authority on the other hand to maintain state neutrality regarding all religions and to guarantee freedom of conscience. It has replaced secularism as tolerance in the legal jurisprudence of many countries for obvious reasons: it depoliticizes the relationship between religion and the state and positions the state as beyond religious conflicts (Berger, 2014). Although Berger (2014) initially found state neutrality to be good policy, he warned that neutrality, or even-handedness, could not extend to civic life, where he believed liberal and democratic states have a duty to promote justice, human dignity, rights, freedom, equality, and respect for difference.…”

Religion and Education in the Shadow of the European Court of Human Rights

“…For example, in Ireland, a human rights frame is used to challenge the “integrated curriculum” whereby schools are legally obliged “to ensure that a religious spirit informs and vivifies the whole work of the school” (Mawhinney 2007, 379), whilst in the UK the British Humanist Association has been engaged in an effort to extend the content of religious education to include non-religious world views (Barnes 2015); the resonances of the ECtHR case law on religion and education will differ significantly from one context to the other. Thus, precisely because judicially articulated legal norms take a life of their own when deployed in social actions in various contexts (McCann 1994, 733), the approach must be highly contextualized, sensitive to the variable effects on different types of actors and to changes in the latter over time (Berger 2014), in multiple venues and contexts, and in different country (i.e., national, cultural, and religious) cases.…”

Resisting or Adapting? How Private Catholic High Schools in Quebec Respond to State Secularism and Religious Diversification

“…The crossroads of education and religion is one of the most privileged venture points to study the processes of secularization, institutional deconfessionalization and religious diversity governance in liberal democracies (Berger 2014;Jödicke 2013). It is also a privileged location for studying the contestation of these processes, since the intersection between religion and education is a matter of lively social, political, and educational debate worldwide.…”