According to figures published at the end of August 2009, there was a 1.8% rise on the 2008 statistics in the number of students taking full course Religious Education at GCSE. It was the eleventh annual rise in entrants. 182,000 took the subject. The proportion of young people taking the subject increased also. In terms of grades, 73.4% of RE students achieved a grade between A* and C in August (compared with 72.5% last year).
Among subjects with more than 75,000 entrants, RE remained in the top five for increasing entrants in 2009, building on a 4.7% increase between 2007 and 2008, and a 7.2% increase between 2006 and 2007.
The fact that more and more children are studying religion itself points to a growing interest in – and awareness of – religion in the world today. But what are the benefits of studying the subject? Let me suggest five.
In the first place, religion has always been with us. In order to understand the present, we need to understand the past. The impact of religion on world history and civilisation has been immense. Consider the contribution that Christianity has played in shaping our society here in the
Secondly, religion isn’t just yesterday’s news. It’s hugely significant today. The American sociologist Peter Berger has said that ‘We don’t live in an age of secularity, we live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity.’ In 2006, 2007, and 2008, Gallup asked 1,000 people in each of 143 countries and territories whether religion was an important part of their daily lives. In the 2008 poll, the average proportion of respondents who answered affirmatively was a staggering 82%. The results from each country have an associated sampling error of ±4 percentage points, but it’s clear that globally religious faith is very much alive (if not always well).
Thirdly, like it or not, religion is the future. The Economist got it completely wrong when it wrote God’s obituary in its special issue for the Millennium in 2000. In their excellent book, God is Back, Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue that the proportion of people attached to the world’s four biggest religions – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism – rose from 67% in 1900 to 73% in 2005 and is expected to increase to 80% by 2050. Therefore, it’s clear that children should study religion if they are to engage properly with the modern world, even if they personally have no religious faith.
Fourthly, religious literacy is important for commerce. In a recent lecture, the Chairman of Lazard, Ken Costa, argued that "religious faith is an essential part of the global context in which we now do business. The major corporations are employing more and more people of different faiths and working in contexts where faith is a central part of a person’s identity and values. Companies are increasingly designing policies relating to their employees’ faith, addressing important issues such as dress, diet and prayer. Since faith matters to people, it matters to markets."
Finally, and perhaps most contentiously, religion persists and should be studied because it is often life-giving. Of course, events like 9/11 and 7/7 are examples of how religion is violently re-asserting itself and can be life-denying, but that’s only part of the picture. Every child has a right to a spirituality. In the words of Tony Blair, "Why does [religion] continue to inspire works of supreme self-sacrifice and selflessness? This is because, along with all the doctrine and theology, the practice and the ritual, at the core faith represents a profound yearning within the human spirit. Indeed it is why we talk about the spirit."
Paul Woolley is Director of Theos
