The Religious Education Association in Our Global Reality

The article identifies international cases—from the United States, Europe, and the United Nations—of an emergent interface of religion, education, and security. This is manifest in the uses of religion in education to counter religious extremism, the notional “counter terrorist classroom.” To avoid an over-association of extremism with religion, the article provides some historical reminders that the post-Enlightenment centuries were marked by political extremism, particularly in the phenomenon that came to be known as totalitarianism. In freedom-espousing doctrines on all sides—Communist, Fascist, and Nazi as well as democratic—education here too was an invariant adjunct of political and security processes. All regarded religion too as contributory or contrary to such freedom. What is new now is the global use of religion in education for political and of late security purpose. Using Isaiah Berlin's (2002) “two concepts of liberty,” I argue that evidence of—often subtle, often explicit—security uses of religion in education mark in new ways a connection of the political with the religious. Although such moves are in intention benign, I conclude that political and security interventions and justifications for religion in education will inevitably shift the aims and purposes of religious education to the aims and purposes of political and security interest.