Kicking God out of schools - 4 April 2011 |
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There’s a petition doing the rounds at the moment in connection with the exclusion of Religious Education from the proposed English Baccalaureate. Here’s what it says:
I am profoundly concerned about the exclusion of Religious Education from the Humanities options in the curriculum of the English Baccalaureate.
Because Religious Education has the strong potential to increase understanding and tolerance, building social cohesion in our increasingly diverse society, I am calling on you now to include Religious Education as a Humanities option in the curriculum of the English Baccalaureate.
If you want to work out whether to sign this petition, you’re going to have to weigh up a number of apparently competing factors.
On the one hand, you might be disinclined to sign it because you regard RE in state schools as pretty much a lost cause anyway. Perhaps you think it often has little to do with the historic Christian faith, or that it’s often taught badly, or by non-Christians, or both.
Perhaps you would also be disinclined to endorse (even implicitly) the cringingly humanistic stance adopted by the petition itself. Since when did “Religious Education [have] the strong potential to increase understanding and tolerance, building social cohesion in our increasingly diverse society”? Christ, and Christ alone, has the potential to do this, and any statement to the contrary is a direct challenge to his uniqueness. It would be quite understandable if Christians were unwilling to sign a statement that implicitly embodied a false gospel.
On the other hand, you might be inclined to sign the petition for the sake of the relatively few Christian teachers for whom state-sector RE still provides an opportunity to talk explicitly and fruitfully about the Lord Jesus in the classroom.
If you do decide to sign, you can do so here.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Minister's Blog