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Reply to Andrew Wright

Andrew Wright in BJRE 26 (2) has criticised my article in the same issue, which suggests that no good reasons have been given why religious education should be a compulsory school subject. I would like to clear out of the way two misunderstandings he has about my position before looking at the reason he gives in favour of compulsion. First, he characterises my thesis as arguing ‘from the irrelevance of religion in society to the conclusion that religious education is no longer tenable as a compulsory subject’ (p. 167, his italics). But I do not use this argument. Neither do I base my conclusion on social consensus (p. 167). It is true that I suggest in my introduction that ‘organised religion plays little or no part in the great majority of people's lives’ (p. 152). But I do not use this claim as premiss for my conclusion. The substance of my argument comes not in my introductory paragraphs but in sections 1 to 4. Here I examine a number of justifications that others have put up for compulsory religious education and find them all wanting. Wright also speaks of my presumption that my ‘preferred secular world view should be adopted as the normative foundation for education in contemporary Britain’ (p. 169) and, linked with this, of the danger of children being ‘inducted in an uncritical manner into the values of secular humanism’ (p. 173). But the fact that I hold secular beliefs does not imply that I want children to be taught such things uncritically—any more than a committed Roman Catholic need want pupils to be indoctrinated into Catholicism. There is indeed nothing in my essay which points in that direction. Quite the contrary: I argue in favour of children discussing religious claims, about the existence of God, for instance, or about an afterlife (pp. 162–4). True, one can favour discussion (to a point) and have an indoctrinatory intent to close minds rather than open them; but I do not belong to this camp.