Back when I was going through school, RE was designed to teach about religion. Now it is openly Christian and evangelical. The reason for the change is no doubt complex but I believe it comes down to two major forces: (i) the pandering by political parties to religious leaders, most abjectly by the conservative parties but not exactly rejected on principle by the Labor party either, and (ii) the promise of cheap education by outsourcing RE to volunteers, almost all of whom are by self-selection religious and evangelical. The sad fact remains that the RE that I experienced in a private high-Anglican grammar school thirty years ago was more open-minded and educational than what is being taught in supposedly secular government schools today.
I know all this because I had the dyspeptic pleasure of reading our children’s RE textbooks for this year. They are ostensibly Christian. I have little concern about this. The majority of Australians are nominally Christian. Australian culture, being descended from Western Europe’s, is immersed in Christianity. Even from the purely literary perspective, our arts are soaked in Christian imagery and metaphors. Any RE course of any value will teach the basics of Christian thinking. But what we have is not teaching about Christianity. What we have is open proselytising, and not just of Christianity but of a narrow band of Christianity. In all four Connect textbooks we bought, there is not a single reference to Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese Universalism, or atheism/agnosticism, to name just the beliefs with more than 100 million adherents. There is no indication that other religions exist. Other Christian perspectives appear not to exist either. I don’t expect an in-depth analysis of the Gnostic traditions or the reasons for the Orthodox schism, but it it would be nice to acknowledge that there are other views out there beyond the particularly narrow and conservative high-Anglican tradition embodied in these books. There is no indication that not everyone in the world believes these stories, nor any indication that some people agree with the stories but have different interpretations. This is, to put it plainly, an act of deceit with the aim of securing the conversion of children which takes place with the full sanction — indeed within the official curriculum — of the public education system.
You think I exaggerate? Well, take a look at these:
Your children, too, can be evangelists! Just wait ’til they get home tonight.
And how can our children serve Jesus? By doing precisely what conservative Anglican priests in Sydney tell them to do, of course.
Yep. That’s blatant Creationism in our school texts.
Excellent. Tell children their own judgement is worthless, then challenge them to measure their trust in God in a classroom full of other students and with a Christian volunteer overlooking the process. Peer pressure plus authority pressure being applied to nine year old children. How nice.
I wonder who provides this material? Well, it turns out to be…
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