Religious education and the pandemic: postcolonial perspectives

ABSTRACT

This article provides a critical, historical analysis of religious education and the pandemic through the perspective of postcolonial theory. Showing through an interdisciplinary lens how colonialism and contagion have conjointly configured cultural and civilisational change, it shows how sources from religious and literary history can illuminate the current critical landscape of decolonisation. The article opens with some general contextual remarks about decolonising the curriculum at the interface of postcolonial theory and education. Demonstrating, then, the political-theological currency of contagion, the article frames contemporary church closures during the pandemic as presenting contrasting lessons in theology from the pandemic present and world history. Revisiting the colonial on this basis, the article shows how religion and education have also been at the epicentre of empires. Thus, the spread of Biblical literacy had the unforeseen historical consequence of interconnecting erudition and the eradication of peoples. The article outlines here how and why, therefore, the role of religion and education is integral to the critical contours of postcolonial theory. These analyses provide, it is argued, potentially liberating disciplinary frameworks for religious education itself; and lessons, too, to which postcolonial theory could also well attend, that is the abiding importance of religion in education.