With special attention to Denmark, this article discusses to what degree religious education in public school in the Scandinavian countries, often said to be among the frontrunners as regards non-confessional religious education, reflects and accommodates an increased religious pluralism as well as public and political discourses linking national identity, social cohesion, the good citizen and society with the traditional majority religion as the basis for the (positive) values of the country, the society and the state in question. The article, which also discusses what is called the 'repoliticization' and 'securitization' of religion (with special regard to Islamophobia, Islam and immigrant Muslim minorities), concludes, inter alia, that parts of the RE curricula do not just include a wider variety of religions but also helps to counter, if not stop, changes that have to do with the new plurality of religions. The analysis indicates that religious education is meant to serve the promotion of social cohesion by way of promoting knowledge and understanding of the new multi-religious world, at the same time as it continues to promote and propagate, for example, Danish culture as Christian, and Christianity as the sine qua non for social cohesion.
This article, written on the basis of many years of research on this topic, also forms part of the author's contribution to the research project on religion in the public sphere, supported by the Russian Foundation for Science (grant N 17 - 18 - 01194) under the auspices of the Ural Federal University.
Translated from English by Alexander Aghajanyan.
page 46Keywords: religious education, RE, religious pluralism, re-politicization, securitization of religion, politics of identity, religion as cultural heritage.
Introductory remarks
In my previous articles, I had to cite the observation of Jean-Paul Villam, a sociologist of religion and former director of the French Institute for Religious Studies, who noted that all models of ...
Read more