The Impact of the Status of Religion in Contemporary Society upon Interreligious Learning

Abstract

The author analyses the growing importance of IRL against the background of a changing European society. Based on sociological research, the traditional status of the Christian religion ‒ and the monoreligious education that normally accompanies it ‒ is seriously being challenged by the process of secularisation and the growing plurality or religious attitudes and beliefs among people in the West. Europe has become a complex network of influences that constitute the actual symbolic field employed by people in their search for truth. The interest for religion is still very much alive. People are not endlessly indifferent but still hope to find (religious) truth and meaning, even if this process has become much more complex today. In this context, interreligious dialogue itself becomes a religious act. The status given by a religion to other religions is of crucial importance for its ultimate credibility. In this line of thought, religious education should transcend both a purely monoreligious approach and a purely objective-comparative (multireligious) approach, and instead should cultivate in the pupils ‒ at the very borderlands of the different religious, cultural and geo-political territories ‒ an attitude of practising interreligious dialogue as a religious event.