The Helsinki Symposium on Religious Literacy and Religious Pluralism: New Directions for Research, was the culmination of the ‘Religious Literacy in Action’ research project (RELIACT), and brought together academics and practitioners to address questions that go right to the heart of current scholarship in the religious literacy field: what is religious literacy trying to address? Is it ignorance about religious and non-religious traditions or is it prejudice about religious and non-religious identities? Is religious literacy constituted through the acquisition of substantive knowledge about religious and non-religious traditions, or is it a set of transferable skills and competencies? Is religious literacy a prop for theological or ideological agendas, and to what extent is it implicated in particular historical and cultural formations such as pluralism? What are the causes of religious illiteracy? Is it some kind of amnesia brought about by secularization, or something else? Finally, what is the evidence that religious literally works, and how can literacy about religions and non-religions be measured?
The Symposium began with two key notes which set up the debate between advocates and critics: Alice Chan of the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy on the one hand and Titus Hjelm and the RELIACT team[1] on the other, with the subsequent panels and papers streamed according to their engagement with the literacy concept, which rather pitted “empirical” contributions against “conceptual”, “critical” and “applied”, and which seemed to surface the old opposition of the normative or ideological to the empirical, and of values to facts. I will return to this at the end of this report.
The panel ‘Case Studies in Theory and Practice’ with Diane L. Moore (‘Critical Religious Literacy: Definition and Collaborative Applications’), Atalia Omer (‘Critical Religious Literacy and Teaching the Case of Palestine/Israel’) and Hussein Rashid (‘Creating Practical Impact with Scholarly Rigor’) was notable for its commitment to religious literacy as a tool for the interrogation of power and decolonisation. I later Chaired a panel which included two excellent papers interrogating the implication of religious literacy in national formations, specifically contemporary Shinto in Japan (‘Teaching Shinto, Teaching Nation: Religious Literacy in the Service of National Homogenization’) by Ernils Larsson, and contemporary Islam in Morocco (‘Rethinking Religious Literacy: Defining Orthodoxy in Morocco’) by Alice Catanzaro. Both papers did important work in mapping the intersections of religion and the state to produce specific forms of religious literacy. A further panel examined religious literacy in relation to extremism and digital media, and included the papers ‘The Apparent Absence of Religious Literacy in the Responses to the Bondi Shootings’ by Beth R. Crisp and ‘Religious Literacy versus the Algorithm: Young Adult Encounters with Religion in Online Spaces’, by Kate Soules and Alice Chan. This panel prompted a lively debate highlighting the potential implication of religious literacy in the production of religion as an object of law and state action.
I delivered my own paper ‘Alternative Imaginaries for Religious Literacy: Gramsci, Freire and the Praxis of Learning’ in one of the final sessions. The paper centred the research project ‘Developing Resources for Religious Literacy for FE: A Social Justice Approach’, funded by St. Peter’s Saltley Trust. I set out a case for religious literacy as a means of addressing prejudices, stereotypes and cliches about religious and non-religious identities through the cultivation of specific competencies implicated in encountering difference, competencies that do not simply affirm any potentially authoritarian notion of cohesion but uses arts-based methodologies to enable deep learning and reflection, or “praxis”.
The Symposium did not simply assemble ready-to-go perspectives and pitch them head-to-head, but catalysed provocations, dialogues and responses that go right to the heart of what it means to be a scholar engaged in the study of religions today. Russell McCutcheon once defined the field in terms of a distinction between critics on the one hand, and caretakers on the other. It was a timely response to the influence of Mircea Eliade and a move to treat religion as any other socio-historical phenomenon rather than as something special requiring its own, unique hermeneutic tools. But the religious literacy debates illustrate why the critic or caretaker binary distorts what’s at stake: there is no objective, outside space from which to speak, no naturalist stance from which to enunciate, only the messy flux of the world in which we are all implicated, like it or not. Sometimes, without exhausting the possibilities, religious literacy is the attempt by institutions and states to parse that flux and to redraw the lines and boundaries of religion and non-religion, and sometimes it is the attempt by non-profits and social movements to address racism, discrimination and violence both by and towards religion and non-religion. In such complexity, a normative stance seems essential to the analysis and critique of states and institutions, and to supporting bottom-up efforts to engage religious and non-religious communities in new initiatives for learning.
[1] The team in full is Titus Hjelm, Roosa Haimila, Tuomas Äystö and Zeinab Karimi.