Religion at School in Secular Europe

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

(1) A minor suggestion to p.9, lines 349-350: I would add a clarification, something like However, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Croatia and Lithuania, among others, offer it as an alternative to confessional teaching of religion, IN THE FORM OF A POSSIBLE OPTION FOR ETHICS INSTEAD OF RELIGION.    (... or something like that. In my first quick reading I was mislead by the sentence as it currently is.)

(2) I am not sure, but think that in Poland there is an "opting-in" model for religious education, as opposed to "opting-out" models as e.g. in Austria or Germany. Do such differences have any relevance for your classifications?

Author Response

Thank you very much for your review. It has helped us to improve the text.

Especially thank you not only for offering criticism but also for offering proposals which, as can be seen in the final text, we have very much welcomed.

The reviewer is right in pointing out that Poland has the "opting-in" formula as opposed to the formula in Austria or Germany. In this respect Rogowski (2016, p. 184) points out:

"The school is obliged to organise RE or ethics education for groups made up of at least seven pupils from the class in question. If the number of pupils wishing to attend is smaller than seven, the religion/ethics lessons must be organised in groups made up of pupils from several classes'.

(Rogowski, Cyprian. 2016. Religious Education at Schools in Poland. In: Religious Education at Schools in Europe. Part 1: Central Europe. Edited by Martin Rothgangel, Martin Jäggle and Thomas Schalg. Vienna: Vienna University Press, pp. 185-208.)

This is not only the case in Poland. As we say in the text, the confessional model has many variants; to give an account of them is beyond the scope of this article and would call for another text focusing on this model. That is why we have not developed further nuances and variants.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please see attached PDF with reviewer comments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We sincerely appreciate the critical contributions made in terms of both content and form. Regarding the form, we perceive a constructive and proactive attitude that is not very common in the academic world and for which we are grateful. Regarding content, the critique rightly points to a topic that we touch on tangentially in the article: pluralism.

We believe that it is beyond our possibilities and beyond the spirit of the article itself to go into this topic in the depth requested by the reviewer; it would lead us to write another article. However, the critical review has made us realise that we should introduce some important nuances for a better understanding of the text, which are included in the "cover letter".

The considerations made by the reviewer made us reflect on several points, which we did not add in the cover letter, but we refer to them briefly in this reply to the reviewer. We are aware that each of the points we make opens up a dialogue and in the argumentation of the whole would lead to a much longer text.

1. We agree with the critique that the framework of secularity is usually presented as a neutral framework; but it is often loaded with ideology and anthropological and philosophical understandings that are not neutral. We agree on the different understandings involved in the use of the term pluralism. Among the authors pointed out by the reviewer, we have consulted some texts by Watson, Carr and Kennedy which we have quoted in order to introduce some nuances in the use of the term pluralism.
2. As explained in the "cover letter", we added a qualification on the understanding of pluralism after Berger's quotations. A brief comment for the reviewer. The quotations from Berger, read literally and in isolation from Berger's work, can be misinterpreted as praise for ideological pluralism. In this sense, we believe that the reviewer's point is very appropriate, and hence the paragraph we have introduced. However, we believe that a careful reading of Berger's work as a whole does not give rise to a defence of this type of pluralism. Rather, his thesis is that modernity, as we know it, necessarily entails a pluralism of worldviews, but he does not enter into the discussion of procedural, ontological and epistemological aspects of the truth claims of each of these worldviews. We believe that Berger would subscribe to the nuance we added to his quotations. However, it is not a question here of exegesis of Berger's work, and it is possible that more than one might disagree with our interpretation. It would be an interesting topic for discussion.
3. We agree that the understanding of secularism is related to a certain understanding of pluralism that entails epistemological and ontological choices about truth claims. Depending on how pluralism is understood, very paradoxical positions emerge regarding the understanding of what is true. The reflections on the concept of truth, the relational key and Gadamer's hermeneutic horizon seem to us to be very suggestive and far-reaching; Kennedy raises and develops them extensively in his doctoral thesis. To take up this reflection in a coherent and consistent way in our article would take us to write another article, which is beyond our possibilities at the moment.
4. We understand and accept that what has been said in the previous point has consequences when it comes to situating and evaluating the teaching of the religious phenomenon in the school system. In this sense, we have pointed out some of the weak or critical aspects of the laicism model (very clearly), but also of the “learning about religion” and “learning from or through religion” models. We added something to the strengths of the confessional model on the basis of this reflection (again, we are grateful for the criticism that helps us to improve our text, even if only in a limited way). Once again, we point out that to go further would have exceeded the objective of this article, which is much humbler and more limited: to show that there is not only one model of secularism and that the European secular framework (within its plurality of forms) is far from having a unified response to situate the teaching of the religious phenomenon in the school system. More generally, we try to answer with an example the question of how secularism observes the religious phenomenon, which is the general framework of the special issue of the review as defined by the editors.
5. The authors of the article have not wished to be apologetic; we have tried not to opt for any particular model, but rather to show the goodness and the limits that each one may have, as well as the limitations of the European secular framework in dealing with this issue.
6. Within the different meanings of the term secularism, we made a choice (along the lines of Taylor). Watson, Carr and Kennedy (to refer to the authors we have consulted on the basis of the reviewer's suggestions) are operating with another concept of secularism. We are using the same term with different meanings. Put very briefly (it would of course need further explanation), the concept of secularism used by these authors could in no way be a neutral framework, it would become another "comprehensive doctrine of the good" that cannot claim any special status of neutrality.
7. We understand that the approach we are taking leaves open another issue that we have not gone into, which could be generically described as the criteria that a secular society (in the sense we use it) can have to manage the plurality of "comprehensive doctrines of the good". We only show (hopefully convincingly) that it does not have a "standard" formula to situate the religious phenomenon.
8. On the title chosen. It is clear that a longer title would give a better account of the nuances developed in the article. All the suggested titles seem valid to us and certainly show an excellent understanding of the text presented by the reviewer. Once again, many thanks for the suggestion and for the constructive spirit it expresses. We agree that the title we have chosen does not reflect the nuances and complexity of the subject developed. However, despite losing the richness of nuances, the authors are in favour of a title as brief as possible, on the assumption that the interested reader will be able to find a more extensive description in the abstract.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf