Religious Education and Its Discontents

This chapter identifies a series of interconnected "conceptual shocks" that destabilise the intellectual foundations of progressive religious education (RE) as articulated in European legal jurisprudence and English curricular discourse. Taking the 2025 UK Supreme Court decision in JR87 as a point of departure, the chapter interrogates the assumed stability of the categories "objective, critical and pluralistic" that have governed RE since Folgerø v. Norway (2007). Drawing on two public intellectuals as heuristic lenses—Tom Holland's genealogy of Western secular thought as fundamentally shaped by Latin Christian categories, and Iain McGilchrist's cognitive-epistemological critique of left-hemisphere dominance in modern culture—the chapter argues that claims to neutrality in RE may mask unexamined Christian-Western normativity, and that the displacement of spiritual, contemplative, and participatory ways of knowing renders the subject incapable of engaging authentically with what makes religion religious. These arguments are situated within established RE scholarship (Copley, Cooling, Barnes, Gearon, Fancourt, Vince) to demonstrate that the current settlement is both epistemologically unstable and ethically problematic, constituting a form of epistemic injustice toward religious traditions and practitioners. The chapter does not advocate a return to confessional approaches but calls for epistemological humility in law and policy, explicit engagement with multiple forms of knowing, tradition-sensitive curricular structures, and honest acknowledgement of the value commitments embedded in any educational framework.